I actually liked “HIM”
“HIM” is fast, tense, gorgeous and terrifying. It hit me like a helmet to the chest. .
Jordan Peele, director of Black horror hits “Get Out,” “Us” and “Nope,” stepped into the producer role on this film, which led viewers to expect a film that focused on some of his preferred themes: Race, power, viewership, objectification. But with Justin Tipping as director, the film promised a different stylistic viewpoint than Peele’s previous work.
If you go into “HIM” expecting a Jordan Peele film, that’s not what you’re going to get. Where Peele lets shots linger, forcing the viewer to sit in discomfort, Tipping pushes “HIM” at a breakneck pace. The film cuts in time with the pulsing soundtrack, only stopping when the camera itself is mobile, bobbing and weaving to make viewers as dizzy as Cameron Cade, the main character.
Actually, that’s not quite true. In some moments, the camera seems almost magnetized to Cameron’s face, like the movie wants to be just as trapped in his head as he is. It works, partly because Cameron is magnetic. From his introduction as a child rooting for his favorite football player, I felt instantly connected to the character. While some might find his father’s insistence that Cam look at the carnage of a player’s possibly career-ending injury because, “That’s what real men do, they make sacrifices,” a little heavy handed, I immediately felt the weight of it. Like little Cameron, his face in his father’s hand, when that line was delivered, I believed it.
As an adult Cameron edges closer to his dream of being a football phenomenon, he receives a traumatic brain injury in an unexpected assault. While everyone around him wants to make sure that Cam takes care of himself and recovers, no one even bothers to mention his attacker. No one asks who did this to him, or why. They’re only asking one question: Can he still play?
Burden, sacrifice and masculinity are huge themes in “HIM.” While Cameron insists that playing quarterback for the aptly named “Saviors” is what he wants, the story mostly happens to him, as if he has no other choice than to do exactly what he’s doing. Even when he’s horrified, even when he’s hurt, even when he’s forced to hurt other people, Cameron follows the path laid out for him. Partly out of guilt, partly to make enough money to support his family, but also partly because… what else is there for him to do? The blood, violence, shame and fear are just the price of admission for a party he assumes he wants to get into.
“HIM” makes the cultishness of the sports world literal, transforming the already horrifying tendency of football to subject its players to life-altering or deadly injuries into a sacrificial cycle. As Cameron goes through his week of training with his idol, Isaiah White, it becomes increasingly clear he’s being groomed for something other than just the field. Cam is sized up and measured, the individual parts of his body assessed like he’s a collection of cuts of meat, or a car about to be sold. The resident doctor puts him through strange rituals and injects him with something he doesn’t describe. There are enough hints dropped that it’s not even surprising when White explains it all at the end: The Saviors have been recycling the blood of their star quarterbacks for generations, transfusing the current quarterback’s blood into their successor to pass on their star power.
It’s a biting critique of the industry, a more visibly bloody presentation of professional football’s tendency to use young Black men’s bodies to enrich the franchise’s mostly white owners, then discard and replace them when they can no longer play. The critique is made more visceral by the film’s depiction of injury: Shots of bones and blood laid bare by an X-Ray like filter that let us see past the skin as skulls crack and brains rattle.
Even as someone who hates football, I found myself pulled into Cameron’s terrified obsession. I’ve never had, and never really understood, the kind of passion that would make a person willing to keep working through brain damage, knowing that work would inevitably make it worse. “HIM” stuck me inside the head of someone who did, and it was a terrifying ride.
