On January 2nd of 2023, Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest in the opening minutes of a Bills/Bengals game with massive playoff implications. It was a fluke accident, caused by a hit to the chest in just the right place at just the right time to interfere with cardiac function. Though Hamlin was luckily brought back to full health and his football career continues to this day, he was technically and literally dead on the field for a few terrifying minutes.
While Hamlin’s heart stoppage is an extreme case in point, the fact remains that injuries in professional sports are commonplace. Athletes have to push themselves past the point of physical endurance just to get a shot at the national level, their careers are notoriously short, and the long-term effects can be devastating even after retirement. While pro athletes have some measure of protection through union membership, they still have to deal with league ownership and sponsors who are far less interested in player safety than in making money and cutting costs (see: the CTE cover-up). Yes, the players are making millions, but they’ll only have a brief time to make and spend that money while the owners are making billions and living comfortably into ripe old age.
In summary, what we’ve got here is a system of capitalist exploitation in which young men — disproportionately men of color — throw themselves into a meat grinder for a shot at fleeting fame and fortune, all to entertain the masses and make a handful of old white men obscenely wealthy. With all that in mind, it’s frankly astounding that Jordan Peele hasn’t made a film about this yet.
Granted, Peele is only involved with Him as a producer through his Monkeypaw shingle. The real auteur here is director/co-writer Justin Tipping. Even so, the film was made and marketed as a trippy psychological horror film about an up-and-coming football player — Peele’s fingerprints are all over this one.
The premise is straightforward. Tyriq Withers plays Cameron “Cam” Cade, who was more or less brought up since birth to be the greatest quarterback of all time. Unfortunately, as the draft is coming up, Cam suffers brain damage from, uh… well, it’s not entirely clear what happened. All we know is that Cam got some kind of head injury and there are now staples in his head. Staples that look conveniently like the laces on a football, I might add. Anyway, the injury means that Cam has to skip out on the combine, which in turn damages his prospects of getting drafted into the pro leagues.
(Side note: The NFL branding is noticeably absent from this movie — I’m sure I can’t imagine why — so the league name and all the team names are fictional. More on that in a minute.)
Enter Isaiah “Zaye” White, here played by Marlon Wayans. Here we have a superstar quarterback who somehow overcame what should’ve been a career-ending injury and went on to win a record eight — count ’em, eight — championship rings. But now that Zaye’s contract is almost up and he’s set to retire, he’s interested in training Cam as a potential replacement. The deal is that if Cam agrees to come down to Zaye’s state-of-the-art home/football camp in the middle of the desert (Because why wouldn’t a football superstar have one of those?) and train for a week, Zaye will pull some strings with the team management to draft Cam.
I should add that Zaye was and remains Cam’s childhood hero. Even better, Zaye is the franchise QB for the San Antonio Saviors — Cam’s home team, and the only team Cam is interested in playing for. Naturally, Cam takes the deal. Between his brain damage, Zaye’s eccentric celebrity nature, the bizarre setting, all the drugs Cam gets pumped with, and a variety of other factors, trippy head games ensue.
At this point, it’s worth pointing out that because this is a cinematic metaphor for the seductive evils of football, of course they didn’t get the rights to name the NFL or any existing league. This in turn meant the filmmakers were free to make up whatever team names they wanted. Hence the Saviors, an especially prominent instance of the religious motif that runs all throughout the picture.
The point is further hammered home with the cross pendant that Cam is never seen without, not to mention the overzealous fans (most notably Marjorie, played by Naomi Grossman) who worship Zaye with an obsessive single-minded mania. Hell, Cam and his entire family are so devoted to the Saviors, talking and acting like they have a deep-seated personal investment and direct involvement in whether the Saviors win or lose, it really kind of does resemble a kind of religious fanaticism. One that Cam was indoctrinated into since birth, as clearly seen right at the open.
Incidentally, it’s worth noting that pretty much every depiction of the Crucifixion shows Jesus mostly nude, with every square inch of every ripped muscle on full display. Not unlike the film’s depiction of Cam through much of the running time. Furthermore, this is a movie all about suffering pain and sacrifice to achieve mortally brief greatness for the entertainment and enlightenment of the entire world. Who exemplifies all of that better than Jesus Christ?
The film is honestly quite brilliant in its depiction of the metaphor, arguing that football is merely the latest iteration of some ancient quirk in human psychology. In this cruel and mercurial world, we need something constant to believe in. Something to bring families and communities together. Something that gives us heroes to look up to. For a great many people in modern-day America, football provides all of the above.
Which brings us to Zaye. This guy is football incarnate. He is so unpredictable and treacherous precisely because he represents all the ups and downs of life as a professional quarterback. He offers no mercy or nuance in showing Cam all the fame, the glory, the pain, the sacrifice, the responsibility, and the personal accomplishment that comes with the job. Hell, Zaye even gives us a brief monologue shouting out the origins of football, explaining how the game of football — you know, the game Zaye and Cam literally love more than life itself — started out with the exploitation and mockery of Native Americans!
At this point, you might be wondering about the comic relief. Enter Elsie White, Zaye’s wife, a vapid and laughably shallow socialite played by… Julia Fox. The casting says it all, really.
The bottom line is that the movie provides a haunting and incisive psychological horror metaphor for football, what it takes to achieve greatness in the sport, and its place in American culture. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much all the film has going for it.
Yes, Marlon Wayans and Tyriq Withers both turn in transformational performances here, running the full gamut in their depiction of two characters utterly destroying themselves and each other. Here’s the problem: There’s really nothing else to these characters. Yes, Zaye is supposed to be an enigma by virtue of the plot and the genre, but that doesn’t change the fact that he registers as a symbol of football itself with very little sign that he’s an actual three-dimensional human being.
Likewise, Cam has a development arc that can be traced with a ruler. Aside from some hollow and generic lip service to his family, Cam has no motivation or personality aside from his burning desire to be the greatest football player ever. Again, I get the film’s point that Cam has been so thoroughly indoctrinated that he’s got a love of football where his personality should be. With all due respect to the film’s themes, that doesn’t change the fact that we’re following a protagonist with precious little in the way of personality or agency in the plot.
The one minor exception comes at the climax, when the filmmakers try to pull an inexplicable face-turn. Even there, we run into problems because that climax doesn’t match the rest of the film in terms of tone or theme. And it certainly doesn’t help that the protagonist doesn’t have a strong enough motivation to take things as far off the rails as he does, not after everything he had already done and been through to get to that point.
I hate to say it, but Him reminded me very much of another film about the evils of football: Concussion. Both movies had a lot to say about the topic, and both delivered some compelling statements, yet neither one was made by a competent storyteller. In the case of Him, we’ve got a couple of outstanding actors elevating their script, but that’s not enough to compensate for one-dimensional characters and an undercooked plot. I might further add that the bugfuck visuals seem to have been crowbarred in so the film could be marketed as a prestige horror (they were certainly more bizarre than legitimately scary), and that laughable attempt at a tacked-on feel-good ending was a bad move all around.
And let’s not forget that we’re coming into October, which is sure to be a crowded month for horror films. I’m open to the possibility that this one might get a following and a reappraisal further down the line, but I wouldn’t recommend it for right now.