There is a certain degree of body horror baked into American football that becomes readily apparent whenever players sustain gruesome, career-ending injuries on camera. For some, football’s overt violence is part of its appeal, and players are seen as people who have chosen to risk their safety in pursuit of fame and glory. Over the years, the public has become much more aware of football’s potential to leave players’ bodies and minds irreparably damaged. Much has also been written about the structural racism that is pervasive throughout the football business. But the NFL continues to rake in billions of dollars annually because fans love tuning in to cheer on their favorite teams.
These are some of the more salient ideas percolating in director Justin Tipping’s new sports horror Him. The Jordan Peele-produced film wants you to be thinking about them as it spins a disorienting tale about a football star in the making whose life is turned upside down when he meets his childhood hero. Him is more stylish than “scary” in the traditional horror sense, and it becomes increasingly baroque in ways that make it feel less and less rooted in reality. But even though the movie starts to fall apart in its final acts, it works as a thought exercise about the prices people are willing to pay for one of America’s favorite pastimes.
Him centers on Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), a talented college quarterback whose love for the game runs deep. Though Cam is constantly surrounded by his doting family, it’s only when he’s playing football that he can feel close to his deceased father (Don Benjamin). Some of Cam’s earliest and most powerful childhood memories revolve around the time he and his dad spent watching Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) lead the San Antonio Saviors to victory. And after years of dedicating himself to becoming a top-tier quarterback like Isaiah, Cam’s at a turning point in his career that could catapult him to the big leagues.
Everyone — especially Cam’s agent (Tim Heidecker) — is certain that he’ll be one of the first new QBs drafted into Him’s conspicuously unnamed football league. But Cam’s hopes of joining the Saviors are dashed after he’s attacked during a late-night practice and left with a concussion that forces him back out of that year’s pro combine. With a head full of staples — a visual that Him repeatedly zooms in on, as if to say, “You see how his skull looks like a football, right?” — and swelling on his brain, Cam’s in no shape to play or show off what he can do. But when Isaiah reaches out with an offer to train Cam personally for a week and potentially get him onto the Saviors, Cam beelines to the star’s palatial compound somewhere out in the desert.
As with the case with Opus and Blink Twice — two other recent thrillers about people venturing off to spend time with rich and powerful men in remote locations — there’s a middling predictability to the beats of Him’s story. It’s obvious that Cam has put himself into a dangerous situation as he’s driven through a crowd of feral fans who camp on the outskirts of Isaiah’s estate. And the strangeness of it all becomes that much more pronounced once he’s inside Isaiah’s home, which is really more of a shadowy temple / museum filled with shrines to his years of success.
It feels as if Tipping — who also cowrote the film with Skip Bronkie and Zack Akers — is trying to channel some of Get Out’s more carefully crafted horror energy as Him introduces Isaiah’s wife, Elsie (Julia Fox). The movie presents her as one of the many trophies Isaiah has collected, but it is immediately clear that there is something off about the seemingly happy married couple.
All of these glaring red flags make it somewhat difficult for Him to build any real sense of suspense. And the film telegraphs many of its scares so loudly that Cam becomes hard to take seriously as a character.
Part of the problem is that Wayans delivers a performance that is so unhinged (in a good way) and menacing that there is never any question about how dangerous Isaiah is. Withers is great at embodying a trusting guilelessness as Cam, but his character often feels flat and dully written compared to the people around him. It’s never quite clear whether you’re meant to read Cam’s leadenness and Him’s frequent flashes of disturbing, unexplained imagery as manifestations of the young player’s recent brain injury.
Exacerbating that head trauma seems to be Isaiah’s main goal as he starts putting Cam through a series of grueling training sessions that become progressively more macabre. One sequence about testing Cam’s reflexes involves another man’s face being smashed to a bloody pulp by a high-powered football machine. Another follows Cam on a jog into the desert, where he collapses and begins hallucinating a mascot who means to murder him. Visually, Tipping’s direction is at its strongest and most arresting during Cam and Isaiah’s scrimmages with a handful of other men. The action itself is dizzyingly kinetic, and the painful impact of the players’ collisions is thrown into sharp relief when the film shifts to give you an X-ray view of their bodies in motion.
Though Him doesn’t exactly work as a compelling horror, the movie almost saves itself from being a complete disaster in the moments when it slows down to articulate certain ideas about football culture and the racial inequalities that exist within the professional league.The gauntlet Isaiah puts Cam through doesn’t always make the most sense narratively, but it is peppered with beats meant to illustrate the dehumanization built into actual football combines and that system’s parallels with chattel slavery. Throughout the film, football is presented as a kind of religion, which comes across a little cartoonish when it comes to Isaiah and Cam in the present day. But that same energy feels much more effective earlier on when Him is focused on Cam’s youth, when he was taught to see football and sacrifice as key parts of masculinity.
If Him spent more time building those kinds of reflections into its story and fashioning them into meaningful horror set pieces, the movie would have a stronger pair of legs to run on. But by its final act, Him spirals out of control in a rush to overexplain a series of barely sensical twists. Him is not the next Get Out, but it’s also not the next War of the Worlds, which is to say it’s on the undercooked side of being just okay.
Him also stars Jim Jefferies, Naomi Grossman, GiGi Erneta, Maurice Greene, Guapdad 4000, and Tierra Whack. The movie is in theaters now.
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