Don’t be fooled into thinking this is Jordan Peele’s fourth film.

Sharing his father’s (Don Benjamin) obsession with football as a child, Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) grew up to become a top-pick quarterback, following in the footsteps of undisputed league all-star Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). An unprovoked and malicious attack puts Cam’s life goals in jeopardy… and a dozen staples into his head. About to lose everything he’s ever worked for, his agent Tom (Tim Heidecker) reaches out to Cam with an irresistible offer: spend one week training with his personal hero Isaiah — at his lavish desert home far from prying eyes — to satisfy the team owners interested in signing him. After meeting his influencer wife Elsie (Julia Fox) and personal physician Marco (Jim Jefferies), Isaiah puts Cam through his paces like a two-faced drill sergeant, never knowing who will emerge next. As the week progresses, Cam finds himself dismissing increasingly weirder and bizarre events and encounters, suggesting something sinister at work just out of his focus in his self-distraction. Cam instead dwells on the question that’s most important to him: does he have what it really takes to not just succeed but take everything for himself?

Primarily a television director, Justin Tipping helmed and co/wrote this script with “Limetown” writers Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie, filmmakers having no problem creating a slow-burn thriller (as evidenced by creating a storytelling podcast that evolved into a full-blown television production). What’s misleading in this film’s marketing, however, is the involvement of Jordan Peele — who’s last film Nope was nothing short of spectacular — while being neither the writer nor director of Him. Trailer imagery suggests some degree of delusion or a possible mental breakdown, maybe even a side trek into limbo or purgatory or whatever else might be infernal adjacent. Whether Ol’ Scratch intends to make a personal appearance or not, it’s rare to see an all-in football-based horror movie, but what is it really trying to say to its audience?

The production looks great — it really wants to be The Cell when it grows up — but as the story unfolds, the convoluted metaphor keeps changing. Is it about selling out or selling your soul? Is it about toxic grooming or toxic masculinity? Body expectation vs. reality? How the sports industry can be bad or that it always was? As devilish hints keep dropping and our protagonist keeps allowing himself to drift further into the outer reaches of experience, viewers already familiar with films like The Devil’s Advocate keep waiting (and waiting) for the other hoof to drop. It eventually does, of course, but by then it’s hard to really even care anymore as the premise is exhausted; the brief 90-minute-ish runtime does nothing to improve upon this effect. While not everyone’s game night, Ready or Not did something amazingly similar to this before ending it in a far superior way, and that’s a hill I’ll gladly die upon.

With elements of isolation, manipulation, and peer pressure to perform, the idea is rife for exploitation… not unlike our protagonist Cameron. An unbalanced focus at the start of the second act shortchanges the narrative as the weekdays are counted down in chapters. While it makes sense Cam’s manipulators want to keep their investment off-balanced, forcing the viewer to endure along with him strains the plotline’s credibility; nothing is cohesive, a series of unfortunate but not-enough-to-walk-away-from events. With little certainty to latch onto, all the audience can do is wait for an answer at the end, culminating into a ritualistic gameday bloodbath that means… well, pretty much whatever the viewer wants it to. Of course, it may also mean the filmmakers had no idea how to end it, so it just sort of does.

Perhaps the original idea was akin to In the Mouth of Madness, where our hero investigator (played by Sam Neill) is sent to retrieve a missing manuscript that just happens to be a mass-produced mind-breaking best-seller (soon to become a major film). Because it’s Lovecraftian in nature, madness is expected by the end… even if the viewers are the only ones who saw it coming. Back to Him, why would an all-star in the best shape of his life — destined to replace their hero and mentor — never think to question introducing a likely biohazardous agent into a strict physical training program? That would be insane, right? Do you read Sutter Cane? Good… then this shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Him is rated R for strong bloody violence, language throughout, sexual material, nudity, some drug use, and never meeting your heroes.

One skull recommendation out of four