I DISAGREE WITH CRITICS ABOUT JUSTIN TIPPING'S 'HIM' (SORT OF)

Full disclosure: I do not like sports. Any sport. But I especially don't like football. Watching overly buff dudes smash into each other—sometimes, I swear I can feel the impact through the screen—just doesn't do it for me. Sue me. But because I don't like sports, I also don't typically watch sports movies, tv shows, or even read books with athlete protagonists. I gleefully missed the era of Friday Night Lights hype.

But Justin Tipping’s supernatural sports horror, Him is not a sports movie. It wants to say something about sports, about the price of greatness, about the insanity of fandom, about the violence inherent in pushing bodies to the edge—and maybe beyond. And there are moments where it pierces through, where the commentary and the horror align, where I felt sufficiently unsettled. But it also feels like those moments are peppered between so many scenes of shouting, visual excess, and symbolic overload that it doesn't always add up.

Him clearly has high ambitions.

*SPOILERS FOR 'HIM' FROM THIS POINT*

It's a Shame You're So Talented.

The story follows Cameron “Cam” Cade (played by Tyriq Withers), a college phenom invited to a mysterious desert training compound run by San Antonio Saviors quarterback Isaiah White (played with unnerving magnetism by Marlon Wayans), a once-legendary athlete turned mythic guru.

Cam has watched Isaiah play since he was a child. He watched Isaiah recover from what should've been a career-ending injury. And he dreams of fulfilling his father’s wish for him to become the next Isaiah, i.e. the next GOAT.

Now, Cam is the newest generational talent to enter the draft. Life is glorious...until a rando dressed as a demonic spirit cracks his head hard enough to cause a perilous brain injury and his promising career is nearly over before it even starts.

Thankfully for Cam, Isaiah, an eight-time champion (one-upping Tom Brady's seven), is thinking of retiring and wants Cam to train with him for a week to see if the young stud has what it takes. Naturally, creepy shenanigans ensue.

So, let's talk about Isaiah—

Isaiah isn’t just a villain; he’s the embodiment of the American dream gone septic. Once hailed as “the GOAT,” he now presides over a pseudo-religious cult of men sacrificing their bodies to breathe him in and white-coated sycophants—straight outta “Mad Max: Fury Road—who give up everything to worship him.

Why is training with Isaiah Cam's only path to the league? How is it that a title-winning team like the Saviors holds a high enough draft position to nab Cam? None of that is explained. Instead, the film skips over them pesky details to position itself as a feat of fright.

Though it was never meant to be a horror movie in the traditional sense. It was meant to enter this relatively new arena of the "elevated horror", joining the likes of Ari Aster and the film's own producer, Jordan Peele. It was meant to be a meditation on masculinity, violence, and worship disguised as a genre mash-up. It asks its audience to believe that football and cult initiation are two branches of the same tree. And there are even moments—though fleeting—when it makes a convincing case.

There's real potential in what Him is trying to say: the way sport—and especially the cult of the quarterback—demands bodily sacrifice; the mental and physical fallout of concussion; the commodification of young talent; the hero worship. There are ideas worth exploring, and when Him hones in, it is sharper than your typical horror fare.

It positions itself in a long tradition of horror films that borrow from religious iconography, but instead of crucifixes or catechisms, it’s playbooks and pigskins. The football field becomes the altar; the quarterback, a sacrificial lamb; the trainer, a prophet gone rogue.

If this sounds heavy-handed, well, that's because is. Tipping isn’t subtle about his intentions. The film’s opening half hour drips with dread, and yet, if you squint, it’s barely removed from ESPN highlight reels—sweat drenched foreheads, bodies colliding at high speeds, the roar of a crowd.

We already know football is violent. We already know CTE destroys lives. We already know that young, predominantly Black athletes are fed into a billion-dollar industry that eats their bodies and spits out endorsements, car commercials, and broken spines.

Only, in Him, this imagery is the plot. There's lots of "theme" (why yes, there is a "The Last Supper" recreation) all told in montage and quick shots, culminating in a climactic gladiator style indoor arena fight that doesn't quite feel earned. I mean, I guess it's fitting that a film about one of the most violent sports in existence should end in a fight-to-the-death match—two men enter, both men bleed.

Football. Family. God.

The film’s strongest asset is its lead mentor figure/villain, Isaiah White. He's larger-than-life and has a charisma that rubs off even when the narrative wobbles.

Wayans has spent much of his career playing in parody (Scary Movie), but his career isn't entirely without sentiment (Requiem for a Dream, his early dramatic breakout). Here he sinks his teeth into Isaiah like a man starved. This is a performance pitched at the edge of the uncanny: part preacher, part predator, part father figure who knows exactly how to make love sound indistinguishable from control. Every monologue crackles with menace, every smile hovers between seductive and sinister.

There’s a reason the marketing leaned hard on him: this is his movie, even when the camera’s not on him. Without him, Him might collapse under the weight of its own excess. With him, it finds its pulse.

Beyond Wayans, however, the rest of the cast does solid enough work with what their given, though no one else quite reaches his level. (Though I will throw a bone to Jim Jefferies as Isaiah's personal physician. He gives the film some much needed lightness and levity.) Tyriq Withers as Cam, who's supposed to be the film's center, gives a somewhat muted performance— which might be the point. He’s a blank slate waiting to be inscribed, a boy groomed to be “the best” whether he survives it or not.

The Field is My Safe Place.

Him's biggest sin is that it luxuriates, a little too much, in its own design. (Which is no shade. The film's beautiful.) It often leans into surrealism—rituals, the supernatural, occult imagery—without enough grounding. There are times when you’re not sure: is Cam hallucinating? Is this literal? The ambiguity could be powerful, but more often it feels like the film asking you to fill gaps it didn’t bother to build.

It's a film lost in its own imagery. Its visual language takes priority over its storytelling. Vignettes take precedence over momentum. And there are just too many moments when there are a lot of "things" on screen but if you asked me to recap the last twenty minutes I'd be at a loss.

Some of the film’s spectacle demands such a leap of faith that its critique of football culture, sacrifice, and hero worship gets undermined by how implausible it all is. The more surreal moments—the blood transfusions, the secret parties, and that random beheading— sometimes pull the viewer out rather than bring them in. Him trades in metaphor, but sometimes the metaphor becomes so literal that it stops being scary or thoughtful, just bizarre.

Here’s the thing: horror works best when it tells the truth. Zombies are consumerism. Haunted houses are gentrification. Ghosts are broken familial bonds. And in Him, football is the clear stand in. And it's a good one..in theory. Money flows up, concussions trickle down. And it’s a perfect machine for manufacturing gods who are also martyrs. The symbolism writes itself.

The scene that mimics a "combine"—a tryout event where players, primarily college athletes, demonstrate their physical abilities through various tests to showcase their talent for scouts and coaches—where Cam is poked, prodded, and measured, all shot in extreme close up, lingering on needles entering flesh, borders on grotesque. And does an amazing job of highlighting the dehumanizing nature of a real life ritual.

And yet, what makes Him both fascinating and frustrating is how it fumbles nearly every theme it throws at its audience. Its imagery diverges into several lanes, but can't seem to pick one. It's sort of a film about humanity and how much of it we sacrifice in pursuit of success. It's sort of a film about how easy it is to sacrifice when we taste success. It's sort of a film about white ownership of Black bodies. It's sort of a film the god-tier worship of great athletes. But the film doesn't trust itself to stand strongly in any one conviction—so it opts for all of the above. It’s grand. And messy. And sometimes it works. Other times, it feels like the film doesn’t trust us.

So, the biggest question I had leaving the theater is who is this movie for? Hardcore horror fans might roll their eyes at the muddled supernatural elements. Sports fans might bristle at the critique, insisting the game is tradition, not blood sacrifice. And yet, for those who live in the uneasy middle—fascinated by the spectacle, horrified by the reality—Him offers nothing sticky to wrestle with.

What's It Like Being the Goat?

Him is not a perfect horror film. It might not even be a good one: Its pacing is uneven. Its mythology is under-explained. And by the third act, the cinematography, cool as it might look, overwhelms its message, leaving the audience with more confusion than catharsis.

Yet, what makes Him worth the watch and worth talking about is not whether it succeeds as a horror film, but what it exposes about our hunger for spectacle. And the genius of casting Marlon Wayans as the Him before him is that, of all people, he understands spectacle. He’s built a career on it. And here, stripped of parody, he shows us what spectacle really costs: charisma weaponized, worship curdled, victory hollowed out until all that’s left is blood and memory.

It’s not subtle. But, then again, neither is the culture it reflects.

3/5 ★: A brooding, blood-soaked—somewhat hollow—blitz.