Many modern horror movies are made with the belief that it’s more important to have ‘themes’ than it is to actually be about something. The trend of the ‘elevated horror’ theme is frustrating because it often feels like the filmmakers are struggling to decide whether to educate or scare you. 

Justin Tipping’s HIM breaks away from this fad, but not on purpose. Rather, I think HIM is too dumb to have anything important to say. Where other elevated horror movies struggle to choose between scaring you or having something to say, often leaning towards scaring you, HIM fails to frighten or enlighten. 

The film’s ideas are paper-thin, and its scares are too short to leave an impact. It’s only watchable because of Marlon Wayans’ animated performance as Isaiah White, and a script that gets worse with each passing moment, like a car crash you just can’t look away from. 

HIM follows Cameron “Cam” Cade (Tyriq Withers), a young football prodigy who is invited to his childhood hero’s training compound following the latter’s devastating and possibly career-ending brain injury at the hands of an attacker in a goat costume. As soon as he gets to Isaiah’s desert estate, it becomes clear that there’s more in store for Cam than just football. 

Over the course of a weeklong stay, Cam falls under Isaiah’s spell, participating in stranger and stranger training regimens. Before long, Cam is swallowed into the demonic underbelly of professional football and learns just how much it will cost to become the greatest of all time. 

HIM may be a bad movie, but it’s still a decent time at the movies. This is in large part due to Wayans’ performance as Isaiah, Cam’s childhood hero and the fading star of HIM’s legally distinct NFL. An all-star quarterback on the verge of retirement, Isaiah’s charismatic mentor demeanour is quickly shed as he pushes Cam further into his depraved training regimens. 

While I can’t say that Isaiah is unpredictable, Wayans succeeds at the difficult task of making his one-note character into something captivating. He dominates the screen, and his maddened close-ups are the closest the film ever gets to being unnerving. It’s impossible to look away when he’s onscreen, and the movie does a nosedive in quality whenever he’s not around. 

Cinematographer Kira Kelly gives HIM better visuals than it deserves, making use of the training compound’s twisting, serpentine hallways to imbue Isaiah’s estate with a sense of geographic impenetrability. The oddly-lit rooms of the facility provide some much-needed visual flair, especially when much of its runtime is spent in the flat, neutral lighting of the training pitch. 

The film’s standout visual moments are when Kelly films the practice sessions with X-rays, turning the characters into skeletons and giving the sport a visceral feeling I wish the rest of the film had. Unfortunately, these much-needed moments are spread too thin to make up for the rest of the film, leaving me hungry for more great moments. 

The most frustrating part of HIM is that it does have interesting ideas buried deep underneath its shoddy screenplay. The opening scene of the film has Cam’s father urging his young son not to look away from the television, where Isaiah’s bloody, shattered leg is broadcast uncensored to football fans nationwide. “That’s what a real man looks like. A real man makes sacrifices,” Cam’s father tells him. 

It’s not a subtle moment by any means, but it lures you into thinking HIM might have something to say. But instead of taking these ideas and running with them, HIM stops just steps away from the starting line. It has a lot of ideas and only 96 minutes to point at them. 

While it plastered producer Jordan Peele’s name all over its marketing campaign to the point that multiple people think it’s his movie, HIM doesn’t feel like a Peele movie at all. And while he’s only the film’s producer, it’s impossible to figure out what drew one of the most exciting voices in modern horror to produce such an atrocity. 

HIM’s premise is strong, but it’s nothing new under the sun. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the NFL’s first priority isn’t that of its players’ well-being; a quick Google search yields a boatload of results detailing the league’s multiple controversies. Maybe Peele read a different script than what was presented, but HIM is too surface-level for me to understand his involvement. HIM fumbles its solid premise from the very beginning, rapidly devolving into a mess of cheap scares, terrible dialogue, and disappointment. 

Final score: 4 out of 10