HIM hits close to home for the American football fanatic and hits hard. With no punches pulled, Jordan Peele’s latest Monkeypaw Productions installment examines the psyche of the nation’s number one sport.
Written by director Justin Tipping alongside Skip Bronkie and Zack Akers, HIM follows young football prodigy Cam Cade (Tyriq Withers) as he embarks on a week-long training camp journey run by major league GOAT Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). Both men have sustained injuries that should’ve ended their careers, but neither is willing to walk away from the game.
The movie is both a love letter and a warning to football players and fans alike. It celebrates the athleticism and camaraderie it takes to be great while mocking the sheer insanity it takes to ignore the body’s signals and play through it anyway. Sports fans are no strangers to injuries and how they can affect the season, but the film doesn’t give the mercy of commercial breaks whenever a player gets hurt. If anything, it draws a big red circle around the wound and forces the audience to feel the pain again and again. Tipping’s direction is almost cruel in this sense; the cameras zoom in on each injury, and if that doesn’t get the point across, the Mortal Kombat-style x-ray shots of each collision should do the trick.
From the same studio behind Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Nope, the horror of HIM goes beyond just surface-level damage, though. There’s a sinister force behind all the pain and glory of the game. Major league scouts have been following Cam’s young career for some time now, and they’re frothing at the mouth now that he’s ready to go pro. They’re saying he can be the new face of the league and bring even more championships to the franchise. All he has to do is prove to the current GOAT that he’s worthy of the title.
As glorious as it depicts the sport, the movie is relentless in its critiques of the NFL, namely how the organization handles its concussed players. In September 2022, America watched with bated breath as Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa got sacked and seized upon the turf, eyes unseeing and fingers outstretched and twitching in what experts call a concussion-induced “fencing response.” The hit came just days after he sustained a separate head injury. Since then, Tagovailoa has had a total of four documented concussions on the field. He is still playing today.
Similarly, Cam suffers a traumatic brain injury (TBI) early on in the film, and the events that follow do not help the healing process at all. As trusted professionals, the doctors can’t in good conscience recommend that he return to the field. But as diehard fans, they can just put a bandage on it and tell him to keep trucking. The movie is filled with medical malpractice and violence, and it practically becomes a game of how many TBIs does it take to break the human brain? Short answer: It doesn’t take much.
The human brain is incredibly resilient in its ability to self-heal. The concussed mind is resilient in its ability to distort reality whenever it feels threatened. The writing explores both of these aspects but leans more towards the latter. Delusions and hallucinations drive the script to the point of no return, and it’s up to the audience to discern what’s real and what isn’t. Winning is real. Championships are real. For players like Cam and Isaiah, nothing else matters.
HIM is at its best when it embraces these delusions and hallucinations, when it plays into the cognitive dissonance of the typical football fanatic. Why leave it all on the field when there’s nothing left to take home? The writing is somewhat apparent in this critique, which often makes the movie feel more like a parody than a genuine story. Still, the most harrowing elements of this film—the rabid fans, the devastating injuries, the predatory scouters—are all very much based in reality.
Before you watch your favorite team play this football Sunday, do yourself a favor and watch HIM first. You might get a new perspective on the game or end up hating the sport altogether.
Hail Commanders.