Greatness requires sacrifice. Want to achieve your dreams? Then you must give up something in return. Your mind. Body. Loved ones. All must be on the table. Because if you aren’t willing to give those things up to reach the top, someone else will. At least that’s what we’re told. And in Justin Tipping’s trippy psychological horror film, Him, sacrifice is merely the name of the game. But is “making it” worth it, once you’ve given up everything?
Written by Tipping, along with Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie, audiences are tossed into the violent world of professional football. There, we meet Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), a rising star quarterback with aims to become the GOAT (greatest of all time). But after an attack just before the draft leaves Cameron with a brain injury, he finds his hopes fading. That is, until he’s offered the chance to train with his hero, legendary QB, Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). Rumor has it that the eight-time championship winner may retire soon and wants to see if Cam can be his successor. Soon after arriving at Isaiah’s isolated training facility, though, the starry-eyed athlete discovers that if he wants to be the GOAT, he’ll have to sacrifice everything…including his soul.
I don’t need to tell you that football is a brutal sport. Football is pain. Football is violence. The average game sees bodies broken, cut up, concussed. It wouldn’t be out of line to refer to players as the modern-day gladiators. Athletes destroying themselves for our entertainment. That’s what makes the sport a perfect setting for horror…with a violence that Tipping excels at translating to the screen. From the very first frames, a young Cam watches Isaiah suffer a horrific injury that results in the bone of his knee popping out for all to see. The child tries to avert his eyes, but his father forces him to look. That’s what a real man looks like, according to Dad. That’s what Cam must be willing to suffer to become the GOAT.
In the same way that Cam’s dad forces him to observe the violence of football, so, too, does Tipping force the audience to look, like we’re Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, eyes taped open. Only in this case, that violence transcends the game and into every waking moment. One scene has a desperate free agent pulverized for every throw Cam misses. A lesson meant to teach him that as the QB, the responsibility of everyone rests on his shoulders. Vicious sound design wrecks the nerves with a soundscape of breaking bones. A trimmer catches the staples from Cam’s head injury (conveniently meant to look like the laces of a football). Even the healing process is made gruesome, a frequent display of close-up needles jammed into Cam without warning. Not one second of Him passes without the threat of violence.
Many a film has been made about the brutality of football. What sets Him apart is the way Tipping observes the NFL’s treatment of Black athletes, specifically. The process for drafting players has always been problematic. Their bodies poked and prodded by NFL teams (the majority owned by white men). Acquired by a team they didn’t choose. Forced to live in a city they didn’t ask for. The shades of slavery are impossible to ignore. Not to mention the fact that Black QBs must go to greater lengths to prove themselves. Like Isaiah says, a Black man must be great just to be good. It becomes a running joke that Isaiah constantly states he’s going to go watch some film, a comment on the fact that he can never stop working. Never stop killing his body to keep his job and make wealthy white man wealthier.
Through it all, Wayans delivers a complex performance that shakes the Earth. He portrays Isaiah as a tortured yet menacing individual, able to flip on the intensity at any second. When he goes, he goes, and it’s enough to make you sit as far back in your seat as you can just to escape his fury. Luckily for Withers, he’s more than up for the task, able to match Wayans’ passion with his own. More than anything, the two actors are the backbone of Him. In the roles of two men pit against each other and pushing themselves beyond the limit, they feel like a pair of performers pushing their talents as far as they can go.
Despite the strong messaging and even stronger performances, Him falls into applicable yet exhausted clichés populating other Faustian tales. Blood-drinking rich white men. Cultists who wear the same old pig masks you’ve seen in every other horror film of the past decade. A vague narrative drenched in hallucinogenic imagery that kicks any logic out of the stadium. All of it pulled further down by a disorienting script that plays on Cam’s injury but leaves the story feeling as if there are holes everywhere. A strange choice, considering we’re never given reason to believe this is all in Cam’s mind. Scenes often end in abrupt fashion, failing to capitalize on momentum. It’s like a team struggling to get the ball down the field. The QB makes a few miraculous plays to keep the drive alive, only to fumble in the end.
Ultimately, Him is a furious vision fueled by rage towards the NFL and the way Black athletes are treated, yet bogged down by tired tropes and a disjointed script. Still, both Wayans and Withers manage to perform the task of real-life QBs and carry the film on their backs when it struggles. No, it isn’t the GOAT of sports films or even sports horror films. Not even close. But there’s nevertheless a power to Tipping’s story that resonates, making it a movie that the NFL most certainly doesn’t want you to see.
Him is now in theaters from Universal Pictures.
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