Stylish horror show stabs at the brutality of a sport worshipped by Americans every weekend
Him
Starring Marlon Wayans, Tyric Withers and Julia Fox
Directed by Justin Tipping
Rated R
In theaters Friday, Sept. 19
With phantasmagoric imagery, religious references and vicious stabs into the heart of American football, this high-toned horror show wants to make you think about the destructive brutality of the game that a young college quarterback (Tyric Withers) feels like he was destined to play.
Withers’ character, Cameron Cade, grew up with a football-obsessed father idolizing a (fictitious) NFL team, the Saviors (religious reference!), and their star quarterback, Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). Ever since he was a child, little Cade dreamed of being the GOAT, the greatest-of-all-time QB. “I’m him!” he shouts.
When Cade gets a concussion, his plans of becoming the new Saviors quarterback are sidelined and he goes to train for a week at White’s private compound. There he enters a nightmarish swirl of violent drills, unsettling visions and bloody psychological games. Wayans, best known for his comedy work, shows that he’s more than capable playing a menacing, duplicitous mentor—a buddy-bro friend one moment, a grinning demon the next—in a HQ that looks like a cross between the lair of a James Bond villain and a massive desert monastery. And turns out White isn’t so ready to give up his own GOAT mantle.
Director Justin Tipping—working under the banner of producer Jordan Peele’s horror-centric Monkeypaw Productions—throws in a mad swirl of stylistic touches, mostly to heighten the sense of Cade’s increasing disorientation. Was Cade attacked (twice!) by a pickaxe-wielding mascot? Did he choke an overzealous fan to death, or was that a bad dream? Was he really seduced by White’s sexy wife (Julia Fox)? Are those NFL owners actually wearing pig masks? Sometimes it feels like an extreme Twilight Zone, or an episode of the British series Black Mirror, with dabs of grotesque, Fellini-esque weirdness—like a quick flash of a dinner staged to look like Jesus and his disciples in da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
At a party, the team doctor toasts Cade with what the New Testament notes as Jesus’ last words on the cross: “It is finished” (yet another religious reference.) But Him isn’t finished until it’s drilled home the intense commitment—and sacrifices—required to become a professional football star. “No pain, no gain,” we hear more than once. It’s a sport where players are “groomed” to conform to rules and learn to be ruthless, to become “killers”—or to get grievously injured. It’s a sport with violence and combative terms in its very vocabulary; a pass can be a “bomb” or a “bullet,” or “lobbed,” like a grenade. And it’s a sport that encourages the glorification—bordering on deification—of its star performers.
But it’s no rah-rah endorsement of the game, by any means. It reminds viewers that football can chew up its players, break them inside and out. When it all ends, in a grand-guignol splash of severed heads, fountains of blood, slit throats and a body sprawled atop a pentagram, on a playing field surrounded by faceless cheerleaders and pompoms, it’s not exactly a rousing halftime show.
Him is a clash of the titans, a gladiatorial battle to the death, an angels-and-demons war exposing the ruthless soul of a sport that many Americans openly “worship.” And somehow, it makes sports mascots even creepier than they already are.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 