There are films that challenge the intellect, films that terrify the soul, and films that seek to combine both worlds in ambitious ways. Then there are projects like HIM, Justin Tipping’s new football-themed horror experiment that somehow managed to attract high-profile backing including Jordan Peele as a producer. On paper, this should have been a fascinating contribution to the sports-horror niche, a genre hybrid ripe with possibilities. In practice, however, what unfolds across its runtime is a hollow, confused, and ultimately frustrating work that appears to neither love football nor understand horror.
The film attempts to tell the story of Cam Cade, a gifted young quarterback, whose life takes a sinister turn after suffering a severe injury and subsequently training under his childhood idol, Isaiah White. What might sound promising in concept quickly crumbles under the weight of unclear motivations, muddled narrative choices, and a confused script that fails to establish a coherent tone. Instead of offering an insightful critique of football culture, race, or toxic masculinity, the film wastes its opportunities by veering in and out of meaningless symbolism and poorly realized frights.
The Premise Without Purpose
From the earliest scenes, Tipping sets up the father-son thread as the backbone of the protagonist’s motivations. As a little boy, Cam witnesses Isaiah White, the legendary quarterback of the Saviours, battling against debilitating injuries yet pushing forward with tenacity. Inspired by his father’s belief that greatness means sacrifice, Cam grows up with dreams not just of succeeding in the NFL but of fulfilling his father’s vision of him becoming the greatest quarterback alive.
By the time Cam enters the professional draft fourteen years later, he has talent, determination, and pressure. He is marked as a generational quarterback prospect. His career should be taking off, but the narrative suddenly thrusts him into a chaotic series of events. A spiritual and possibly demonic presence begins to haunt him, linked to both his passion for football and the violence inherent in the game. He is then invited by Isaiah, now a multi-time champion and veteran of the sport, to join a week-long personal training retreat in a remote desert compound. The idea is that the aging legend will mentor the rising star.
Yet from here, logic begins to unravel. There is never a clear reason why Cam’s dream of entering the league supposedly hinges on this ambiguous training retreat. Nor does it make sense why a championship team like the Saviours would be in a draft position to recruit Cam. Plot holes are not inherently fatal, but this film depends heavily on initiatives and decisions that do not align with the basic rules of football or even the structure of its fictional world. From the onset, it is evident that the story is not interested in grounding its stakes—everything feels like a shortcut designed to propel Cam into isolation inside Isaiah’s domain, regardless of whether the journey makes sense.
A Compound Wrapped in Symbolism
When Cam arrives at Isaiah’s secluded desert estate, the imagery bears little subtlety. He is greeted by followers clad in immaculate white uniforms who evoke imagery from dystopian works like Mad Max: Fury Road. Isaiah’s home quickly transforms from a training center to an ominous compound. The first demand placed upon the young quarterback is to hand over his mobile phone. This device-surrender trope has become common in recent cinema, often intended as an easy narrative device to remove technology from characters’ control. However, the decision here feels unoriginal, unimaginative, and deeply contrived. It is not grounded in convincing character reasoning but rather planted to strip Cam of easy contact with the outside world.
The film further divides its narrative into six chapters, each representing a day of the week that Cam spends under Isaiah’s guidance. While in theory this creates a sense of structural progression, in practice it only highlights the lack of development. Each day, viewers see Cam subjected to peculiar, extreme, and sometimes bizarre methods of training intended to harden him both mentally and physically. But the exercises themselves feel directionless, as though randomly stitched together from ideas that might sound horrifying rather than earn any narrative justification.
Themes that Never Land
Perhaps the greatest disappointment with HIM is not that its horror fails to scare but that its central ideas never cohere. The story wants to criticize football as a brutal spectacle in which bodies—particularly Black bodies—are used up and discarded by a largely White system of ownership and profit. These are crucial ideas worth exploring and lend themselves to meaningful commentary through allegory and horror. But the execution here destabilizes the very discussion it tries to spark.
Isaiah’s peculiar approach to mentorship could have been framed as a representation of generational complicity, a veteran forcing the same toxic culture onto the next generation. Instead the film turns his methods into a confusing mix of voodoo, physical torture, and irrational spirituality. Viewers are left asking whether Isaiah’s intensity comes from personal glory, religiously tinged motivation, or systemic exploitation. The script never clarifies.
In addition, Cam’s visions of a demonic mascot wielding a sledgehammer appear sporadically throughout the story. Is this figure part of Cam’s subconscious struggling against injury and pressure? Or is it meant to physically exist in the reality of the narrative? The film oscillates between both interpretations with no consistent logic. Horror can thrive in ambiguity, but here confusion is not an artistic choice—it is carelessness.
Medicinal injections compound the disarray. Isaiah’s personal trainer is shown injecting Cam with murky vials, and though the imagery is meant to suggest danger and body horror, the effect is flat because nothing about the substance or its consequences are explored. Similarly, late attempts to incorporate religious motifs fall flat. A sudden emphasis on a thinly drawn Christ-like parallel feels rushed, unimaginative, and borrowed from far stronger works.
Comparisons that Expose Weakness
To understand what goes wrong in HIM, comparisons with past works are unavoidable. Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday delivered social critique in a way that still celebrated the adrenaline of the sport. It understood the intoxicating spectacle even while acknowledging the brutal exploitation beneath it. By contrast, HIM neither celebrates nor condemns convincingly. It hovers in limbo, uncertain of its perspective.
Visually, there are moments of striking composition thanks to cinematographer Kira Kelly. Sweeping camera movements around serpentine compound tunnels create a sense of claustrophobia, while infrared images capture the violent impact of collisions between players. These flourishes show the potential of the film in isolated instants. Yet beautiful shots cannot compensate for a flawed narrative. A film must know what story it tells, and this one simply does not.
Performances that Collapse Under Pressure
Strong performances might have salvaged the story, but they prove another weakness. Tyriq Withers as Cam Cade never finds depth in portraying either resilience or vulnerability. His delivery feels wooden, lacking the charisma to make him a believable future football star. Marlon Wayans, stepping in as Isaiah White, is miscast. At 53, he is too aged for the role of an active champion quarterback at the height of his career. His attempts to present both menace and inspiration land awkwardly, neither frightening nor compelling. Julia Fox, portraying Isaiah’s wife, is relegated to a thinly drawn character whose contributions are minimal and forgettable.
Dialogue repeatedly drags the film into laughable territory. Lines meant to convey gravitas instead ring as hollow clichés. Exchanges between Cam and his father or between Cam and Isaiah fail to convey authentic human emotion. Instead they sound like caricatures of football motivation speeches rewired through a muddled horror filter.
Horror Without Conviction
At its core, HIM wants to serve as a horror story. But rarely does it succeed. The scares veer between psychological and supernatural without commitment. Paranoid hallucinations, demonic presences, drug-induced visions—all of these elements appear, but none receive the development to create tension. By the time the climax arrives, filled with bloody spectacle and chaos, the sequences feel cheap rather than terrifying. They lack the precision of pacing or atmosphere that makes horror effective.
The horror never feels like it comes from a director who believes in the material. Instead, it plays as a reluctant attempt to weave shock elements into a drama about football. But horror cannot be an accessory; it must be the heartbeat of such a film. Without conviction, the audience is left cold.
The Broader Missed Opportunity
The tragedy of HIM is not merely that it fails as a film but that it wastes a valuable opportunity. Sports horror is a genre combination with untapped potential. Football itself is inherently violent, laden with metaphors about gladiatorial sacrifice, physical deterioration, societal expectation, and hero-worship. These qualities naturally lend themselves to horror storytelling. But instead of embracing that raw potential, Tipping’s film fumbles.
A tighter script could have explored the exploitation of athletes within systems of race and power. It could have tapped into the uneasy overlap between religious zeal, discipline, and sacrifice. It could have dramatized the psychological toll of trauma and injury through metaphors of possession and haunting. These ideas were hanging in the air, visible in fragments, but never connected into a vision.
The Verdict
In the end, HIM is not simply a bad movie; it is an uninspired one. It fails to justify its existence by repeating tropes and presenting ideas without developing them. It turns its structure into chapters that signal progression without delivering character growth. It asks broad questions about football and sacrifice while refusing to pursue answers. It teases horror but retreats into incoherence.
Justin Tipping’s second feature after Kicks could have been bold. Backed by Jordan Peele’s name and featuring popular actors, it had the resources to make itself memorable. Instead, it vanishes into the long list of failed experiments, a reminder that ambition without clarity easily leads to collapse. There may be fragments worth examining—occasional cinematography, hints of allegory—but they swirl inside a film that does not know how to anchor itself.
Audiences searching for meaningful horror will find little here. Fans of football cinema will not find passion for the sport. Those hunting for challenging social commentary will be left confused. HIM is less a film than a collection of aborted ideas: an exhibit of ambition strangled by indecision. Beautiful compositions cannot rescue a hollow story, and no glittering mascot lurking in shadows can disguise the absence of narrative heart.
For the sport, for horror, and for audiences, this is one match destined to end in a scoreless tie.
