“Him” Collector’s Edition Now Available from Universal Pictures!
Cameron Cade’s father has been firmly preparing his son to be a football GOAT since Cam was a young boy. Inspired by the 8-time champion Isaiah White, star quarterback of the Saviors, Cam had trained and played through the years and ranks to be the game’s next promising rising superstar athlete. When a mascot-dressed manic derails Cam with a head trauma-induced attack, Cam takes a step back from competing in the football showcase but receives hope when he receives an invitation from the Saviors to work with Isiah White at his isolated training camp deep in the desert. Before long, a dream-come-true turns into a terrifying nightmare as the training sessions go deeper into something far more sinister and Isiah’s greatness may be contributed to unnatural forces bound by limited contracts. How far and how much will Cam have to sacrifice to be the best football player ever and to live up to his idolized hero before the game and those who control it swallow his own soul.
Jordan Peele, once skit comedian with Keegan-Michael Key in “Key and Peele” turned provocative social commentary director of such films as “Get Out” and “Us,” produces the next potshot at cultural critiquing with 2025 released “Him,” a football themed psychological horror that puts sacrifice for the game over family, intensifies the pressures of equating performance with success, and a misguidance from fatherhood/mentorship that intends on grooming a young person into superstardom. “Him” is the sophomore feature length film for Justin Tipping who also cowrite the script along with Two-Up Productions cofounders Skip Bronkie and Zack Akers as the first major movie release for the company associated with Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions that not only produces his Peele’s own films but also invests into minority-driven projects, such as “The Candyman” remake, “Monkey Man” with Dev Patel, and Spike Lee’s the “BlacKKKlansman.”
At top bill of “Him’s” roster is an established comedian, writer, and producer with an even more well-established and famous last name. Marlon Wayans’s breakout project was the sketch comedy TV show “In Living Color” that also highlighted and rocketed the career of Jamie Fox and Jim Carrey but was also considered a family affair as Marlon’s siblings, Shawn, Kim, Keenan Ivory and Damon Wayans, cohosted with him the African-American centric comedy show. In “Him,” Marlon plays the 8-time champion quarterback for a football team that is as venerated as his character Isiah White playing for the Saviors. Wayans, known for his comedic role stints in favorites “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood,” “Scary Movie,” and “White Chicks,” has a surface scratched darker side to his onscreen personas that leave him no stranger to a role like Isaiah White that’s dispassionate yet ferocious – his drug addiction role in “A Requiem for a Dream” is one of those examples. Opposite Wayans is the strong, muscular facial features underneath soft, piercing eyes of Tyriq Withers. The then mid 20-year-old is in peak physical condition for his rising star quarterback Cameron Cade under the pressure cooker of family, agents, and a football league that expects greatness on every level. Withers’ recent principal parts in perceptively pointless and under-the-radar remakes of classic cult films, “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter is Dead” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” didn’t elevate the Florida born actor into the spotlight, preparing him for an upcoming lead in a more visible original psychological horror themed around one of America’s favorite sports, but Withers meets the challenge with a promising performance for his promising character that makes “Him” standout above the rest and being his biggest role of his career catalogue. Wayans and Withers battle out with testosterone trumping into a gray area of occultism that’s not so unlikely from the reality of professional sports. The principal leads are supported by an eclectic supporting cast of eccentric oddities of the isolated training camp with Julia Fox (“Presence”) as Isiah White’s fast-and-loose, high-end wife Elise, standup comedian Jim Jefferies as White’s personal athletic physician Marco with baggage regrets, Tom Heidecker (“Us”) as Cade’s hype manager Tom, Indira G. Wilson (“The Perfect Host”) as Cam’s mother, and Richard Lippert (“Scare Us”) as the saviors behind-the-scenes owner.
“Him” came and went from its theatrical run so fast it feels like only yesterday trailers were being played on commercial breaks and on online previews, denoting Justin Tipping’s movie offering not finding a significant audience for the anti-pro sports treatment of players message. That’s what “Him” powerfully engrosses with is an anti-football message of dog-eat-dog cruelty that cannibalizes itself for what’s best of the sport and discard those who give the sport it all once their eliteness has been completely emaciated, as if the sport is a vampire and drains their athleticism through the carnivorous canines of fans, team, and ownership. Tipping and his cowriters integrate religious and Roman motifs that relate the gridiron as Church or the blood of the GOAT coursing through another that offers divine playing sacrifice and supremacy while certain aspects of the film regard the football fields as coliseum with players being gladiators with even the finale reenacting scenes similar to that of “Gladiator.” Along with those strong imageries, iconographies, and representations, Tipping’s linear telling of the story feeds off the phantasmagory and being on the edge of experimental that, in turn, puts into question Cameron Cade’s reality as everything he experiences from the ominous weirdness pulsating his path forward in football to the macabre training and cultish indoctrinations of Isiah White’s desert training camp don’t come about until Cam’s whacked over the head with a long handled and ornate hammer. Then, the question becomes, is Cam in dead and a warped purgatory? Is Cam hallucinating? Or is Cam actually experiencing the darker side of a game he’s been bred to believe in and be the best at. All of those existential and surreal components overload “Him’s” highbrow and social commentary horror that will fly over the audiences’ head like pre-game ceremony fighter jets.
“Him” arrives onto a collector’s edition Blu-ray and digital combo set from Universal Pictures. The AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, film is stored on a BD50, ensuring room for a visually and audibly stimulating tryout of pigskin piety. Infused darker tones of shadows, Brunswick greens, and plenty variations of brown from the football to the desert located training camp, there are a very few contrasting moments that embolden cinematographer Kira Kelly (“Skin in the Game”) to emerge out from the hefty draping shadows that obscure much of the compounding and confounding irrationality of the insular football fanaticisms. Kelly utilizes an array of long to closeup shots from different scenes or even the same scene to throw off the balance and provide depth when needed for the moment. In addition, the same moments can be implanted with a personal bubble of surrealism through Cameron’s perception of events, never leaving other characters to define the atmosphere or the behaviors that are inherently set by the principal lead character, who or who may not be suffering from an intense concussion untreated unintentionally by the internal turmoil of family politics. Detailed textures and skin tones have organic qualities, and the X-ray vision has seamless segue with all its intensified bone crunching hits. “Him” is presented in a widescreen 2.39:1 for an extra stretch of spherical sighted surroundings that work to enclose on Cameron the deeper he’s in with the mentor’s program as well as to fully embrace his destiny with obstinance in the grandest of finales. The Blu-ray has encoded four audio option a with English Dolby Atmos, a Dolby Virtual Speaker 2.0, a Spanish Dolby Digital Plus 7.1, and a French Dolby Digital 7.1. All options offer extended reach into the audio localization areas of the compressed, multiple channel formats, and even the DVS adds a little extra to throw sound inside a three-dimensional space which is important for “Him’s” haunting and bizarre oneiric structure. The Atmos provides more depth and richer lagniappe effort where it comes with Cameron’s perceptive discords of racing arguments and whispering inceptions. Dialogue is clean and clear throughout, and no issues imposed on The Haxan Cloak aka Bobby Krlic’s subtle descent of a score. English, French, and Spanish subtitles are available. Bonus contents include feature commentary with director Justin Tipping touching upon production areas and the cast to create his footprint as a movie artist, an alternate ending, a removed end credits scene, a handful of deleted scenes, two deconstruction of scenes on how they’re made, Becoming Them looks at Tyriq Withers and Marlon Wayans transformation into elite athletes, The Sport of Filmmaking featurette offers a behind-the-scenes look at production of “Him,” and the Hymns of a G.O.A.T. has composer Boby Krlic’s detailing the elements in creating his movie score for the film. The collector’s edition also comes with a digital code insert to stream or download from anywhere on any device. The physicality of the collector’s edition is more to the tune of a play fake that doesn’t allow the release to run with an overloaded package. Instead, Universal laterally passes with a cardboard slipcover with an embossed title for some smooth font texture. Instead, the standard VIVA case houses the same artwork as the slipcover without the raised lettering and the disc is translucently pressed with the title and film and format technical credits. “Him” has a runtime of 97 minutes, region A encoded playback, and is rated R for strong bloody violence, language, sexual material, nudity, and some drug use.
Last Rites: If you’ve ever thought professional sport players were commodities before, “Him” brings the blitz of putting football above it all by bringing divine blood, sweat, and tears into a cult of sadists and stardom.
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