American football has been compared to the gladiatorial matches of ancient Rome, and not without reason. It is a bloody sport, bloodier than any other popular sport in America. Going further, it has been likened to getting hit by a car repeatedly; I myself have referred to it as “one team on one side, one team on the other side, and they all get permanent brain damage.” Such is the driving force of Him, released in 2025, directed by Justin Tipping and written by Tipping, Skip Bronkie, and Jack Ayers.
Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) is a young football fan who idolizes famed football player Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), and after the latter’s injury is inspired to play the game himself on White’s old team, the San Antonio Saviors. He becomes successful in college, but then suffers an injury of his own after being attacked by a man in a strange animalistic costume. As he takes the field again, despite warnings from his doctor, he is invited to White’s training compound in the middle of the Texas desert to become a better player. As he learns, though, White has made deals with unsavory forces and is pursuing this goal beyond all reason.
This is a brutal film. There are truly copious amounts of blood, delivered in ways that feel deliberately cruel, for none of the violence is accidental. It is a literalization of the idea that football is a blood sport. Cade is suffering for his own glory, for his duty to his family, and for what White wants to mold him into, and he is not the only one who suffers. As so many isolated compounds have warped into, this training facility has become so caught up in its mythology that it makes people do detestable, depraved things, the most visceral involving a machine that launches footballs through the air at a terrifying velocity. This group buy-in is the only way that these young men would tolerate such poor lighting, and what little there is is often in red.
I have read a number of other reviews of this film, and a running theme through them is that they don’t believe the film is particularly thematically coherent. The two themes that grind against each other, so it is claimed, are the theme of racism on the one hand (as the majority of the characters in this film, like the majority of NFL football players, are Black) and the theme of personal ambition on the other hand. I for one find that they can be squared if one looks at the film through the lens of racial capitalism. I am particularly indebted to Nathan Kalman-Lamb’s and Derek Silva’s book The End of College Football: the Human Cost of an All-American Game in my analysis here, and I recommend the curious read it post-haste. Long story short, they believe that the game should be abolished because it is both inhumanly cruel and because its structural pressures force young Black men into life-ruining violence for no real compensation. College Football, they say, is a relic of the plantations. And so with this film.
From this point onward I am going to spoil this film extensively because keeping it vague simply would not be satisfying. Those who want to see the film themselves are advised to stop here.
There are two characters who want something from Cameron: Cameron himself, and Isaiah. Both of these wants are filtered through and influenced by the reality of racial capitalism in which they are immersed. One force that shapes this is their own sense of masculinity; they are expected to be tough, to be ruthless, to sacrifice everything good in the world in the name of ambition. Cameron enters this training facility in a committed relationship, and is later brought to a pool where a number of scantily-clad women are there for his pleasure. He may or may not have had sex with one of them; when he expresses regret over infidelity to Isaiah, the latter says that he cannot care about the feelings of others on the way to football stardom. In the hands of a lesser story, this plot would simply serve as cheap titillation for straight male audiences, but here it represents a very real thing, as Silva and Kalman-Lamb discuss in their book. I refer to part of the bargain football teams implicitly strike with their players: endure all sorts of physical violence, and in exchange these young men can brutalize women as they please (as many sexual assault scandals at colleges and professionally bear witness to). This is seen again at a drug-induced ritual with the white team ownership, with several flashes of half-naked women (the cinematography is psychedelic). This bargain is made even clearer at the end, as Cameron, after killing Isaiah, strides onto a football field, his bare chest caked in blood, flanked by cheerleaders in revealing costumes. More revealing than their costumes are the masks that they wear, hiding their eyes, covering sockets with what appears to be flesh. In exchange for serving the white masters who own the San Antonio saviors, he is being offered women, white women at that, who cannot bear witness.
But women are not the only people Cameron is encouraged to brutalize. The entire system of this compound is not unlike a military boot camp, where young men are desensitized to brutal violence. One scene involves Cameron having to throw footballs at a target; every time he misses, a football is fired through one of the aforementioned machines at the face of another player. As one player is on the ground in incredible pain, the others, Cameron and Isaiah included, huddle around him and sing a team chant. Here, men are being encouraged to find camaraderie in one another, but only camaraderie in violence that serves the rulers of his society. In this society, it is the only way that men like Cameron are allowed camaraderie at all; namely, though hurting others.
At the end of the film, it is revealed that the initial attack on Cameron by a man in a strange animalistic costume was orchestrated by the Saviors leadership to isolate him, thereby making him an easy target for recruitment by the team later on. Cameron is forced to confront his role in the system of racial capitalism, specifically the fact that he is of the caste designated for brutal, degrading work, thereby propping the system up. He was chosen by accident of birth to suffer for others, as so vividly shown by the visceral display of interior human anatomy every time he gets an injection (and there are many injections in this film), or through the sequences where you see players without skin, but as collections of organs held together by bones. Through this X-Ray filter, you are forced to see the very real damage they are suffering - and by extension, the very real damage America consumes for entertainment, and cheers on with marching bands and fan clubs and broadcasts and trophies.
The scene where Isaiah reveals to Cameron that he is but one in a line of football players who have shared blood and ritual as part of the Saviors, followed by a fight between the two culminating in Isaiah’s death, bears a comparison to a scene in the recent film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Long Walk. In an ending changed from the novel, Peter McVries wins the titular competition and is congratulated by the Major, the man in charge of the brutal competition. Following the wishes of his compatriot Ray Garraty, who died not long before, he wishes, as is his prerogative as winner, for the rifle of a nearby soldier. The Major orders the soldier to give Peter his gun, upon which Peter shoots the Major dead. Some have wondered why the Major would not have seen this possibility coming, but I suspect the Major knew of this possibility much as Isaiah saw his death at Cameron’s hands as inevitable. By encouraging Peter and Cameron, respectively, to be violent, they validate the violence that has been inflicted upon them. By transforming these young men into monsters, they have justified in their own minds the monstrosities they uphold. I suspect that both the Major and Isaiah would be proud.
All of this thematic work is brought together in a bloody ending laden with symbolism. You have the rich white men in cushy suits serving as the arbiters of the dignity of a Black man who has been through hell. You have the rich white woman serving as an intermediary. You have a literal contract to be signed by Cameron, accepting a role in the system in exchange for his right to be cruel and to be applauded for his violence. You have the demonic sacrifice, complete with pentagram, showing how morality has been sacrificed to human greed. You have the violence these white men have encouraged bounding back towards them, which is as surprising to them as it is inevitable to us, and the one that gets the most screen time pathetically grovels as he realizes what has happened. You have all the minor functionaries, the cheerleaders and marching band members, all blinded with masks so they cannot witness the workings of this awful spectacle. But of all these the film has a stroke of genius with a chorus garbed in strange animal costumes deliver a rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner as a droning chant, with no melody and none of John Philip Sousa’s embellishments that can make the song beautiful but also a nightmare to sing. The genius is not merely in presentation, but in the fact that this chorus sings not one but two verses, one long-forgotten by most Americans. That verse reads:
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Him is a far smarter film than many critics give credit. It is a searing indictment of racial capitalism in America, and how Black men are sacrificed in droves for the entertainment of the nation. The entire structure of football culture in this country is ultimately a massive arena for human sacrifice, and that bloody enterprise is only barely metaphorized in this film (nor are players the only sacrifices; each year, the American city with the highest rate of sex trafficking is the one hosting the Super Bowl). As hard as it may be to admit, there are many Camerons playing football, and all who love the game are sacrificing him for their amusement.
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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
