Crew
Director – Justin Tipping, Screenplay – Zack Akers, Skip Bronkie & Justin Tipping, Producers – Ian Cooper, Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld & Jamal Watson, Photography – Kira Kelly, Music – Bobby Krlic, Visual Effects Supervisor – Andrew Woolley, Visual Effects – Ingenuity Studio, Special Effects Supervisor – Richard Hahnlein, Prosthetics Designer – J. Anthony Kosar, Production Design – Jordan Ferrer. Production Company – Monkeypaw Productions.
Cast
Tyriq Withers (Cameron Cade), Marlon Wayans (Isaiah White), Julia Fox (Elsie White), Jim Jeffries (Marco), Tom Heidecker (Tom), Naomie Grossman (Marjorie)
Plot
Cameron ‘Cam’ Cade is a star player with the San Antonio Saviors football team. While alone on the field at night, a masked figure strikes him in the back of the head. The blow necessitates surgery and endangers the future of Cam’s career. He is determined to keep going. He then learns that the Saviors’ star quarterback Isaiah White is considering retirement. Isaiah invites Cam to join him for a weeklong intensive training course at his base in the desert. There Cam is placed through a series of training rituals that become increasingly more extreme and outlandish.
I have to say the thought of a horror film about American football does nothing at all for me. In fact, the sport of American football does nothing at all for me period. I am just not a sports watcher and lack the understanding about people who obsessively watch every game, wears jerseys of players and the like. Not knocking it if that’s your thing, it just fails to engage me in the slightest.
I didn’t know what to expect exactly from Him. When I read the title, I immediately thought of the notorious Him (1974). a lost gay porn film about the life of Jesus, which I am determined to see someday. The whole concept of Diabolical Pacts and sports had previously been conducted in Damn Yankees (1958), although that was a musical about an ordinary man who sells his soul to become a star baseball player. There had been Heaven Can Wait (1978) with Warren Beatty as a quarterback who returns from the afterlife to play the game that premature death prevented him from doing. This film’s star Marlon Wayans had even appeared in an earlier sports fantasy The Sixth Man (1997) where he was a basketball player who is aided by his ghost brother. However, all of these are works of light fantasy with a strong emphasis on comedy. If I had to make a capsule summation for Him, I would pitch it as Any Given Sunday (1999) by way of The Neon Demon (2016).
Him is very different to any of these others. For one, it throws you in the deep end of the modern science and industry that is American football and the whole support structure of high-end training, doping and sports medicine that goes along with it. When it gets to the point of injections of whole blood, hyperbaric chambers, talk of GOATs (the non-horned type, although figures outfitted as those turn up as well) and Marlon Wayans’ shouting aggressive and increasingly inscrutable phrases about Tyriq Withers’ manning up, it feels like watching a film that is taking place in another language.
It doesn’t help that Tyriq Withers as a character is passive to the point he walks through the film with little variance of expression, even dialogue, leaving you wondering what he actually did that made him worthy of being considered a GOAT. Certainly, the one thing these scenes do offer is giving Marlon Wayans the chance to show some acting charisma after having spent too long languishing in lowbrow comedy – the likes of Scary Movie (2000) and A Haunted House (2013) and assorted sequels, or being cast as inane comedy relief in films like Dungeons & Dragons (2000) and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009).
On the other hand, Him becomes increasingly more surreal. Not unlike the films of producer Jordan Peele, which are stylishly made and impeccable on a production front and yet frequently impenetrable in terms of their metaphors and symbols. It becomes apparent by the end that Tyriq is being asked to sign some kind of Diabolical Pact but the film evades clearly coming out and doing any more than alluding to it.
There are some fairly wild climactic especially one where Tyriq and Marlon Wayans fight to the death bare-chested in a room where there are cheering crowds projected on the ceiling and everything is shot in a blood red light. And the entirely surreal ending that has Tyriq slaughtering everybody en masse as they are gathered on a football pitch. As to what the film is about though, you guess is as good as mine.
Him was the second film for director Justin Tipping who previously made the non-genre Kicks (2016) and directed for tv in between the two. The film is produced by Jordan Peele, director of Get Out (2017), Us (2019) and Nope (2022), through his Monkeypaw production company.
Trailer here