Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) is the next up and coming American Football Quarterback. A glittering College career looks set to make him the number one draft pick, until someone dressed as a mascot gives him a career threatening brain injury with a mighty thwack on the head. But as hope is fading, legendary player Isaiah White (Damon Wayans) steps in and offers Cade a week training with him at his desert compound to see if he has what it takes. 

HIM is perhaps the least subtle horror movie in the recent line of “elevated horror” movies. With imagery and set pieces that ram home its themes as hard as possible it is an evisceration of toxic masculinity, jock culture, the idolisation of elite athletes and the idea that you should sacrifice your life for your job. All of this “subtext” which is mostly just “text” is played to a backdrop of demonic rituals and the idea that it may or may not be in Cameron’s head thanks to that pesky brain injury. 

If all of that sounds like I did not have a good time watching it then I need to put the record straight. I thought HIM was a riot. Subtlety is absolutely not its forte, but if you can consider the fact it is dialled up to eleven as a feature and not a bug you are going to have a lot of fun. Think of it as a horror homage to Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday that has halved the running time. 

We first see Cade as a young boy watching White win the Championship for the “Saviours”. White suffers a hideous leg break in the winning moments and Cade’s father drums into him the idea of “No guts, no glory”. Later in White’s compound Cade is isolated from the outside world and subjected to increasingly dangerous and subversive training techniques. His masculinity is mocked, he is consistently asked to sacrifice everything to be the best and his entire identity is hinged on being the GOAT or HIM. 

All the while Damon Wayans is delivering what is probably the greatest performance of his career as the manic and seemingly deluded White. A man so famous that he has a throng of super fans permanently camped outside his home that consider him the second coming. 

There is plenty of talk of Football players being modern day gladiators, constant repetition about needing to sacrifice everything to be the greatest, jock hazing behaviours and peer pressure trying to gauge how much of a man you are and plenty of x-ray camera angles of bones crunching under the stress of a tackle. 

Anyone looking for a slither of subtlety or that would consider the besmirching of self sacrifice being an absolute requirement to have a life of achievement will probably have a severe allergic reaction to HIM. I on the other hand spent most of the film with a grin on my face thinking that the idea of giving the best of my life to make others richer is as ridiculous as this film is direct.