Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Justin Tipping
Written by Skip Bronkie, Zach Acres, and Justin Tipping
False start. Production team. Five-yard penalty. Retry third down. Him (2025) is a rare commodity: a sports horror film, and sadly, it fumbled the opportunity away. The production is artistically very ambitious, but it fails to make much of its visual assertiveness. Too weird for your average football fan. Too much football for your average horror fan. Him proudly bears the production backing of horror mogul Justin Peele, and has the cinematic flair of a Peele film, but it lacks the skilled storytelling that the producer is known for.
Sports horror films may be the rarest of the genre mashups. At most, what you can usually expect is the High School star quarterback acting as part of an ensemble of slasher victims. For team sports where the horror is intrinsic to the sport, the pickings get very slim. If you stretch the definition of horror, there is the 1996 thriller The Fan, with Robert DeNiro and Wesley Snipes. Perhaps Teen Wolf? Please. In horror movies, the fear often comes in the form of a great disparity in power between the protagonist and the antagonist. In team sports, the competition is nominally level. Trying to inject an imbalance in the relationship will tip the balance from being either an effective horror movie or a sports movie.
So, Him approaches this by removing the competitive component of the sports movie. This follows an individual training to become the best, whatever the cost. The cliche of the professional athlete doing “whatever it takes” and pushing beyond their physical limits is the study here. Was it compelling? Unfortunately, no. In an attempt to heighten the challenge, the movie steps into surrealism. This is not usually where football operates. The machismo is there, but the scenes operate in a highly stylized and abstracted version of football.
The Cast of Him
- Tyriq Withers plays Cameron “Cam” Cade, a prized college quarterback and a predicted high-round draft pick.
- Marlon Wayans plays Isaiah White, the star quarterback for the San Antonio Saviors. His legendary career is coming to an end, and the franchise has assigned him to tutor Cade through the draft combine preparations.
- Julia Fox plays Elsie Fox, a social influencer and Isiah’s wife. She’s weirdly seductive and
- Tim Heidecker plays Cam’s agent, Tom
- Jim Jeffries plays Marco, the Savior’s eccentric team physician
- Naomi Grossman plays Marjorie, a crazed football fanatic of Isaiah White.
- Maurice Greene plays Malek, an enigmatic Savior’s trainer.
A Synopsis of Him
Cam Cade was a boy who grew up loving the San Antonio Saviors. He and his father were huge fans of Isaiah White, who they watched give his body for a horrific injury in a pivotal winning touchdown. It was this kind of moment that his father instilled a death-or-glory mindset. As destiny would have it, Cam grew up to be a gifted quarterback, the type that you can build a franchise around.
As he is preparing for the all-important draft combine, he is attacked by a big man in a goat costume ( a reference to the sports term: G.O.A.T. = Greatest of All Time). The goat man cracks Cam over the head, giving him a concussion, forcing Cam to abandon the draft combine. Isaiah White announces that he is considering retirement and volunteers to train Cam for the upcoming professional draft personally.
Isaiah takes Cam out to a mysterious training compound in the desert southwest. The austere isolation of the environment allows for intense training sessions that push the boundaries of discomfort into the world of cruelty. White pushes Cade to the emotional and physical brink, often making other roster trainees suffer when Cade fails.
As the training continues, the conditions get weirder. Cade is attacked in the facility by Savior’s superfan Marjorie, who isn’t ready to let Cade become the new face of the franchise. Cam receives transfusions of White’s blood, in a ritual that eventually proves out that this facility, and this franchise, isn’t entirely what it seems to be.
An Evaluation of Him:
Full admission: I fell asleep during the first act and had to replay from the beginning. Despite all the film’s elaborate styling, it’s a dull affair. For a movie about football, it isn’t about the play of the game, but focuses instead on the athlete. Unfortunately, you never see the progression of Cade’s achievements. Why is he so great? We never see him perform within a team. Stunning, for a movie about football.
Also, the characters don’t develop well. They yell a lot, and they offer up a rolling list of sports cliches and pithy dialogue.
A prime dialogue cliche moment:
White: THis ain’t a fucking game, man. This is everything! Do you want this? What are you willing to sacrifice?
Cade: Everything
White: YOU FUCKING SAY IT!
Cade: EVERYTHING!
White: Then show it.
It’s not exactly subtle. It isn’t particularly original. Perhaps most egregious, the movie forgets that it is supposed to be a horror movie until the very end. The training sessions are bizarre and overly violent, but hardly reach the levels of a horror movie. The ending is appropriately cultish and bloody, but by this point, it was too late.
This feels like a movie for a football insider nerd. It’s written for a person who enjoys going through draft data and combine statistics more than watching the game itself. It assumes that a story about the game’s internal corruption would be appealing. And, it could have been. Unfortunately, the story neutered the potential by using fictional teams. If instead, they used the Pittsburgh Steelers… or perhaps better yet… The Dallas Cowboys, it would have resonated better. I am nearly certain the Cowboys made a pact with the devil.
Concluding Thoughts:
I wanted to like this movie. We are still waiting for the great true horror sports movie, but after watching this, I wonder if that is a pipe dream. It was weird, but perhaps not weird enough. I think using the strange pom pom mascot monster “Tinsel Larry” would have injected some fun into the plot. Instead, it lumbers along. It never gives you a reason to root for Cam, either, which is strange, given that in sports, they always set up a hero for you to root for. How is it that the quarterback is such an uninteresting subject?
The film manages to be both outlandish and boring. Unlike a real sporting event, it lacks any internal drama. I suspect Tyriq Withers will have a successful acting career. He is a physical specimen. Withers has some gravitas, and, as a wide receiver for the Florida State Seminoles, looks natural in this role. But, he’s just not there yet as a thespian. He was also in the similarly lackluster I Know What You Did Last Summer, though he was one of the film’s highlights. Marlon Wayans is capable of much better work (Requiem for a Dream, for example). Sadly, he wasn’t able to exercise his well-honed comedic chops, either. Puffing your chest and yelling a lot doesn’t make a performance a dramatic showcase. It’s bloviating.
Him is available streaming on most major streaming services. The movie is rated R for strong bloody violence, language throughout, sexual material, male nudity, and some drug use.
Review by Eric Li
