I’ve been obsessing over horror for the better part of twenty years now, and I’ve never really come across a movie that bills itself quite like this one does.
A sports horror movie – it’s, genuinely, something new, and in a genre as sprawling as this one, there’s something to be said for that. There are a handful that come close (Tokyo Fist was the first thing that sprang to my mind, even if it’s not quite on the mark), but Justin Tipping’s sophomore feature, Him, had an edge to it just by virtue of carving out its own little corner of the sub-genre. The question is, of course, whether it makes a case for its own existence.
And the answer is…sort of. Following Cam (Tyriq Withers), an up-and-coming American football player invited to train with industry legend Isiah White (Marlon Wayans) after a life-changing injury, it doesn’t take long for White’s true motivations – and abilities – to become clear as Cam tries to figure out just how much he is willing to sacrifice for his career.
The most effective – and discomforting – sequences of the entire movie come in the form of the brutal training that Cam is put through in pursuit of his career. Him is at its most visceral – much like The Long Walk – when it deals with the very real, very brutal impact of this sport on the body, nothing more disturbing as a single moment than seeing a brain crash against the inside of a skull during a particularly intense on-field collision. Withers really comes to life here, too, when he’s being pushed past the limits of his basic decency and forced into a crueller, more unrelenting version of himself, undercutting the wide-eyed sweetness that he’s done so well communicating off-field.
Where Him really works for me is in the exploration of sport as religion. From the moment Cam arrives at the church-like compound owned by Isiah, there’s this sense of almost cult-like worship of American football that serves as one of the most compelling throughlines of the story. The natural ritual that’s built into training, into the camaraderie off-field, into the obsessive fans, it’s re-purposed into something genuinely sinister, drawing on elements of mythology that fit so comfortably into the legend that arises around popular sportsmen. The painful sacrifices demanded from the sport feel like a twisted kind of worship in their own right, suffering a form of currency in a way that’s unique to the sporting world. Wayans works brilliantly as this pseudo-religious figure, part myth and part man, so limited in his humanity by his pursuit of success that he sometimes feels divorced from it entirely.
But, by the time the movie closes out, the focus shifts from sports specifically to the industry that surrounds them, drawing on well-worn Masonic symbolism to get into the people who pull the strings rather than those on the field. I don’t think it’s bad, exactly – it gives Julia Fox and her bleached eyebrows a chance to chew on some scenery as Isiah’s wife Elsie, which is undeniably fun – and it definitely tugs on an interesting thread about the racial make-up of those on the field versus those off of it, but it feels too much like something I’ve already seen. The dark forces at the head of a powerful industry is hardly something fresh, even if the sporting world is a relatively new one to find its way into the spotlight here, and the closing bloodbath doesn’t come close to matching the sinister cult of personality that defined the first hour or so of the movie. It sinks into obvious style over substance, which is frustrating when the flashes of substance we got before were so compelling.
And, ultimately, that’s where the film loses me – a compelling first hour packed with interesting ideas about the cult of sports and the worship of suffering as a form of sacrifice, that peters out into a well-worn climax of contracts signed in blood and goat horns. There’s enough in the way of ideas here to prove that the sports horror movie has legs – even if Him doesn’t manage to take it past the touchline.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Hollywood Reporter)
No But Listen 