Roughly halfway through HIM, our protagonist—the promising quarterback Cameron Cade—is instructed by a sinister doctor to spend a few hours recovering in a hyperbaric chamber. The camera shows a pressure gauge inching along clockwise, when an iPhone notification sound dings and we hear a concerned voicemail from Cade's mother. "Don't feel pressure to do anything that could risk your future," she advises, as a tight montage shows an increasingly strained Cade doing what is essentially a phoned-in, nine-second Joker impersonation: banging his head on the walls, smiling maniacally, and writing in blood on the porthole. Do you get it? Cade is under pressure.
If you find this level of metaphorical sophistication to be thought-provoking, then HIM is the movie for you. HIM finds Cade (Tyriq Withers) on the precipice of a professional career, a prospect made somehow uncertain by a concussion that prevents him from taking part in the combine. Instead, his path to the pros necessitates linking up with his childhood idol, star QB Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), for a week of training at his mysterious desert compound. That's where things go off the rails and eventually get gory.
The supposed appeal of HIM is its interrogation of the dark side of football, which the movie nominally undertakes to pose uncomfortable questions to the audience about the impossible, superhuman demands we place on star athletes. A fine premise, sure, although HIM winds up a categorical failure because the movie is incapable of engaging with a single idea beyond the level of mere cliche, and its sole mode of expression is cynical pastiche, a TikTokified edit of something that only loosely resembles a movie. The result, in both form and substance, is remarkably vacuous. Director Justin Tipping wants you to believe he is engaging with some malignant, soul-draining aspects of American life, though all his movie can do is notice that they exist. It's a movie for the moment, not for anything it has to say, but for the way it fails to say anything.
The movie begins with a young Cade watching White suffer a gruesome injury while leading his team to victory, a moment his father uses to draw equal signs between football, manhood, and sacrifice. Does this sound at all allegorical? Well, the team is called the San Antonio Saviors, another blow against the concept of metaphor. The idea that star athletes are notionally Christlike, and sport an American religion, was a provocative insight around the time the NFL had 13 teams. Did you also know that American football is the modern-day manifestation of gladiatorial combat? Were you aware that the acronym G.O.A.T. spells out the name of an animal, one frequently associated with Satan? Would your mind be blown to learn that fan and fanatic share a common root? Did you know owners are greedy?
In other words, there is not much HIM has to say about football as a form of civic religion that football doesn't already say about itself. HIM sharpens the contradictions and presents the football-as-religion stuff as an occulted, predatory form of Christianity, which is a pretty enticing premise, though the idea that football is a ritualistic practice by which we sacrifice our young is, frustratingly, a surface-level read. The movie hints at the various psychic degradations of the sport and can occasionally approach an uncanny presentation of them, as it does when a player volunteers to get brained by a football each time Cade messes up a pass during a drill, though ultimately it doesn't have much to say about those degradations other than, essentially, Damn, that's crazy.
HIM's relationship with genre is equally clunky. The marketing for the movie centers around the fact that Jordan Peele produced it, which, along with the spooky imagery of a hot young quarterback covered in blood, is trying to indicate that this is a horror movie with a social message. It somehow winds up as neither. HIM is like the music-video version of a Peele movie—a somewhat intriguing premise taken nowhere, serving as scaffolding for half-formed suggestions of ideas that it hopes will pass as insight. HIM, to its credit, only takes itself so seriously and does not really try to rip off the more successful or higher-key Peele work. It is never polemical, and it is at least correct in its theory that Damn, that's crazy can be a perfectly fine place for a movie to wind up.
But the process of getting there has to be worth it, and HIM is ultimately not canny enough to subvert anything. A successful horror movie is in conversation with the expectations of its audience, an audience that filmmakers assume to have enough passing familiarity with the genre's canon, or at least its conventions, to know that when they see a character slowly approach a closed door, they should feel a sense of dread because that's where the monster is. Whatever form the "monster" ultimately takes and whatever "approaching the door" looks like in any given movie, what a horror movie must necessarily do is express the subterranean. There is always something lurking beneath the surface. Horror, broadly speaking, is the art of looking at it.
There's nothing lurking below HIM, because HIM is all surface. Partially this is because of its harsh tonality and bad writing, care of Tipping, Zack Akers, and Skip Bronkie—"You know the saying 'God, family, football'? Well, for me it's football, family, God," White says to Cade, grinning, before the young QB gets into the chamber; this is presented as a penetrating look into his character—though mostly this is in the visual language of the movie. There is almost no natural light, with every shot instead lit like a photoshoot for a cologne called "Artificia," nauseating greens and reds used only to highlight Withers's muscles, which, like every surface in the entire movie, are glistening. What feels like 60 percent of the movie is told in montage. What results is the sensation of a series of screenshots stapled together for you to bring to life by flipping them back and forth really fast. Good horror movies borrow from their predecessors; HIM borrows from Instagram reels. A more honest title would have been "POV: That one QB that don't play about GOAT talk 💀."
Withers and Wayans were dealt a somewhat tough hand, though they don't make much of it. Both give performances of emotional extremes. Wayans is alternately the coolest guy in the room or doing a Druski version of a wacky rich guy. While Withers is a capable enough performer to convincingly seem scared, he never quite turns Cameron Cade from caricature to character. Tim Heidecker is here to emit compound swears, and Julia Fox swans in to make stuff weird, though like every person in the movie, they are given precisely one thing to do.
What does HIM have to actually say about God, family, or football? In order: nothing, the sins of the father lowkey do reflect on the son, and it's bad for your body. As for the last point, HIM assumes the viewer is only familiar with football as something that happens in brain-dead debates about who is, in fact, a top-10 QB, with any of the drama and tension of football as a competitive endeavor stripped away in favor of a claustrophobic presentation of the sport as a pain endurance contest. Certainly that's part of it, and HIM does not shy away from showing football in all its goriness, with omnipresent concussions, blood, and broken bones the stated price of glory. The problem is a matter of stakes. Cade's quest is to become the G.O.A.T., something that is only ever shown in terms of personal achievement and as an endpoint, with no interest in the process of that achievement—in other words, the stuff that makes for an interesting story.
The film paws at novelty toward its conclusion, where White reveals that he is merely the latest instantiation of a mythical, eternal G.O.A.T.-like avatar, a single figure who survives ritual combat with a would-be successor, propagating itself into the future by confrontation with and absorption of the best of the next generation. There is something interesting here, as there is in the way White weans Cade onto his blood throughout the movie. Saturn Devouring His Son told through the prism of the NFL Draft is an enticing setup, and in HIM's case, it's woven in alongside the Freudian psychodrama that constitutes the relationship between the two leads. Unfortunately, that relationship isn't treated seriously or presented confrontationally until the end, when it resolves too suddenly: Cade kills White in like 45 seconds.
Instead of Faustianly signing over his life, a bargain his actual father died for so as to give him the chance to take, Cade escapes this trap by remembering that he also has a second, living parent he can satisfy. As a goat-like figure is about to cut his head off, he thinks of his mother and saves the day by killing everyone. The mother resolution is too empty and too late for it to feel like a proper ending, and we are left with the simple relief that the movie is over. Cade killing White is also him simultaneously shrugging off his father's burdensome expectations, delivering HIM's sole compelling observation: the internecine violence of football is merely a symptom of the larger repressive patriarchal culture that oversees football.
If only it didn't take 90 circuitous minutes to get to that point. For all the specific bustedness of HIM, what's most damning about it is that it scarcely feels like a movie. Neither White nor Cade is a character; they are malformed archetypes who exist to strike a series of poses. There are zero lines of dialogue that have not appeared in some form in the comments below a House of Highlights post. At no point will you ever be surprised, nor challenged, nor even grossed out. It is impressive that a movie about wild stuff going down at a compound ultimately feels so frictionless, and that a movie about a loosely Christlike figure has so little interest in revelation.
