Head injuries — the kind too often sustained in contact sports like football — can lead to life-changing neurological diseases. That’s one of the ideas running through the woozy horror movie “HIM,” though when Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), a doe-eyed young quarterback about to go pro, gets a steel poker to the skull courtesy of a very pagan-looking mascot, his brain damage opens the floodgates to all sorts of demons. Are they hallucinations? Post-trauma sensitivities? Or is Cam witnessing genuinely twisted stuff?
In this regard, “HIM,” directed by Justin Tipping, is also a haunted-house thriller — the house being a Brutalist lair in the middle of the Texas desert. This place belongs to the current Saviors’ quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), who, in an apparent gesture of camaraderie, invites a still-injured Cam to train with him in the days before the team’s owners decide whether they’ll let Isaiah play another season or pass the torch to Cam. It’s a touchy subject for Isaiah, who gets particularly twitchy when he talks about the sacrifices he’s made to become the GOAT. But Cam, whose Saviors-obsessed father used to force him to watch videotapes of Isaiah’s greatest plays and most brutal injuries, has been working up to this moment his entire life.
Isaiah’s vibe immediately gives off evil millionaire — he’s busy mounting an animal skull on the wall of his home when we first meet him — and the blasé manner with which he treats the deranged events that follow adds to this menace. Isaiah’s personal physician repeatedly injects Cam with a mystery painkiller, and Isaiah’s influencer wife, Elsie (Julia Fox), struts around like a femme fatale with bleached eyebrows. In one scene, a crew of jacked, shady-looking men join Isaiah and Cam’s training session, and one of them gleefully allows himself to get repeatedly whacked in the face by a football throwing machine — all because Isaiah told him to.
Here, sports and religion go hand-in-hand. Die-hard fans have faith, the biggest athletes are treated like gods, and the entire ecosystem of big-money professional sports — from the drafting process to the massive stadiums filled with amped-up spectators practically speaking in tongues — involves rituals and devotion. “HIM” isn’t the slightest bit subtle about these parallels, which wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the script didn’t rely so heavily on Isaiah’s deranged one-liners to bring home the point (the locker room “smells like brotherhood” and his priorities are “football, family and God” in that order).
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The post ‘HIM’ Review: Dying to Go Pro appeared first on New York Times.
