Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Justin Tipping
Starring: Tyriq Withers, Marlon Wayans, Julia Fox, Tim Heidecker, Jim Jeffries
Recent sports dramas like 2021's The Novice and this year's The Cut have rubbed up against body horror in their focus on the extreme measures athletes are prepared to take to succeed in their chosen fields. Blending American Football drama with full-on horror, Him sees director Justin Tipping take this idea and run with it, only to fumble the ball long before he can score a touchdown.
Like Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday, Him replaces the NFL with a fictional league. The current top team is the San Antonio Saviors, but their aging star quarterback, Isiah White (Marlon Wayans), is said to be on the verge of retirement. Eyeing rookie Cameron "Cam" Cade (Tyriq Withers) as his successor, Isiah invites Cam to spend a week training at his remote desert compound. Having feared his career was over before it even began due to the head injury he suffered in an attack by a crazed fan, Cam doesn't look a gift horse in the mouth and accepts the invite.
Him is the latest in an increasingly tiresome wave of post-Get Out horror/thrillers in which a protagonist heads to a remote location that initially seems idyllic, but which harbours dark and life-threatening secrets (think The Menu, Blink Twice and Opus). The message of such movies usually boils down to this: rich white men who build compounds or buy their own islands are probably up to no good. Him complicates this thesis by making its nominal villain, Isiah, a self-made black man. But of course, just like the real life NFL, this fictional football league is ruled by wealthy old white men.
Set over six days and broken into corresponding chapters, Him sees Cam pushed further and further to the brink of physical and psychological collapse by Isiah, who parrots slogans like "No guts, no glory" and speaks ominously about sacrifice. Things get so extreme and violent that it simply becomes impossible to believe Cam is happy to go along with this. Withers' performance is so wooden and the script so muddy that we can never tell if Cam is gladly accepting what appears to be a Faustian bargain for greatness or is just too scared of Isiah to turn against his idol.
With Jordan Peele on board as a producer, you might expect Him to have some subtextual substance, and there's certainly plenty of food for thought that might be served up by this premise. Is Him about the insane measures athletes will take to succeed? Is it about toxic masculinity? Is it about how rich white men continue to make their fortune off black sweat? It's simultaneously about all of these things and none of them. Him doesn't have an original thought in its concussed head.
Regardless of its fumbled subtext, Him doesn't come close to succeeding as a horror movie or thriller. There's a lack of suspense because the movie keeps us guessing for too long before playing its obvious hand, rather than establishing the core threat early on so we can actually fear for Cam. As a protagonist, Cam never makes us care about his plight because he's such a one-note figure. Having a hulking athlete as a horror hero reminds us why most genre movies opt for female protagonists - there's no vulnerability to Cam, who we suspect could easily take down anyone that threatens him. No amount of music video-inspired flashy editing can distract us from what might be the most boring and uninspired horror movie to emerge from Hollywood this decade.
Him is in UK/ROI cinemas from October 3rd.
