Any given Sunday

HIM

2025

Directed by Justin Tipping

Written by Skip Bronkie, Zack Akers, and Justin Tipping

Spoilers: moderate

It is possible that it's my own contrarian impulses talking, but I get kind of bitter that a movie as jollily, creative weird and just-plain-damned-fun as Justin Tipper's Him, which nonetheless purports to be about real shit but has simply decided not to be tedious and dour about it, still got more-or-less hung out to dry by critics and audiences back in the summer.  (Yes, I know I didn't go see it either, but I meant to; it's, like, a sixteen mile round trip and the stars didn't align.  Your excuses are worse.)  My awareness of those contrarian impulses hung in my head, almost the entire time I was watching it, paired with the thought that it was also equally possible that the compensations I try to make, when I realize I've gotten surly, might just as readily have made me underrate it; though by the end I could see how easy it would be to over- or underrate it.  It has, after all, some pretty genuine and virtually objective problems; but for all that, it's the best movie I've seen in eight years with Jordan Peele's name anywhere on it (this is only not underrating it because BlacKkKlansman technically had his name on it but obviously he was in no position to interfere with Spike Lee), and given how significantly Peele's fallen off for me, from not that high a starting place, it makes sense that it would be, inasmuch as while Tipping is very obviously "doing a Jordan Peele" in broad generic terms—behold, it is a social horror (it also has a pronoun for a name, though I assume that's a coincidence)—Peele also seems to have had very little to directly do with it, besides rescuing Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie's screenplay from the semi-obscurity of the Black List, getting it produced with Tipping as director, and marketing it.  Except there comes a point where Peele must have had something to do with it, and that "something" was "fuck it up with his own preferences," something I was fairly sure about before I looked into it and even surer after I did, because, yep, there's not one but two alternate endings, and both of them would've been better, while the ending we got doesn't even get as far as "managing not to be blatantly incorrect," but it absolutely feels like what Peele would've imposed even if it's desperate, wonky, and inapt (and in ways distinct from the good "desperate, wonky, and inapt" that Him is often up to beforehand).

The movie's about football—well, the movie's about-about masculinity, no prizes for guessing that, but one thing at a time—and according to what I've been told, it either understands football so well (as a business, as a phenomenon, as an athletic activity) that it doesn't see any need to accurately represent it in any remotely literal way, or, alternatively, it just doesn't understand football.  I'm not very interested in that and possibly not any moreso than Tipping (whom the credits indicate did the final draft of Akers & Bronkie's script, though this may only be further evidence of its reshoots).  As far as Him's idea of football is concerned, anyway, football is like this: Cameron "Cam" Cade (Tyriq Withers for the most part, with a young version played by Austin Pulliam in some startlingly good casting—for his whole family in fact) is a young up-and-comer, perhaps destined for greatness, but who's certainly had the possibility of that destiny drilled into him since childhood.  The very first thing the movie's going to do is watch little Cam watch his idol, quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), win the big game in a non-trademark-infringing football league, but only at the cost of a grievous, gory injury, and though Cam's natural instinct is to turn away, his father (Don Benjamin) pivots his head back towards the television and tells him to understand—this is what it takes to win.  Okay, I apologize: I'm somehow being subtler than the movie is; he actually says, "this is how to be a real man."  (Also, it may be worth pointing out that there shall be no further actual or even "actual" football in this entire football movie.)  Fast forward to his early twenties, and Cam is in contention to join his idol's team, the Saviors—implicitly, and even explicitly, as Isaiah's successor—but after a blow to the head that I initially clocked as a symbolically-presented game injury, but apparently was, diegetically, a mascot-like figure bludgeoning him in the skull, seems to derail his chances.  Hope is extended, however, when Isaiah himself invites him to his mansion—his compound—out in the desert, for a personal evaluation that could still put him within reach of his great dream.  Unfortunately, Isaiah is evil.

I mean, that's pretty much "the plot" and even "the story," so far as those things exist in Him, a movie where I could barely tell you why it's even called "Him."  (It's as in, "I want to be ____," though this isn't as stressed as you think it would be.)  And, uncharitably, the rest of it is nothing but riffing on ideas about sport and celebrity and race and masculinity and racialized masculinity and other such things through an art horror kind of lens, though art horror might still be a little bit of a category error.  It'd be an understandable one: it was marketed as horror, it's "from producer Jordan Peele," there's blood and gnarliness and at least one bona fide jump scare, and, indeed, it contains both the apparently-supernatural and the definitely-science fictional, which overlap one another here because it doesn't matter that they do, because it'd probably be better to think of it as art comedy, maybe not even "horror" as such.  ("How did an art comedy about football fail" is, perhaps, a question that does answer itself.)  Anyway, it has a lot more in common with the horror of a Peter Strickland or Coralie Fargeat (or, for a less current reference, Ken Russell) than that of Peele, whom I'll cheerily concede has walked his own path into a weirder branch of horror than most filmmakers pursue, but at least in my estimation, he has (ironically) not really ever managed an actively funny horror-comedy, but Tipping is achieving such a thing all over.  I mean, even in that "summary" above, where I stopped only fifteen minutes into the movie, I'd already mentioned the part where he gets ambushed by a giant in a gaudy-looking costume, an awfully loopy (and funny) image to see.  There's a knowing ridiculousness to the entire affair: it's a movie which sees fit to have Withers doing bench presses in a white dinner jacket, and includes dialogue that unironically uses the phrase "the next GOAT" like that isn't a little stupid-sounding by definition, as well as a tearful monologue regarding Cam's dad, wherein Cam reveals he once told his father he was going to quit football, which apparently was Cam's father's cause of death.  At one point, it even finds a football bouncing down a hallway at him, like the fucking ball did to George C. Scott in The fucking Changeling, except it's a football, so obviously it doesn't "bounce," but sort of awkwardly, hilariously tumbles and spins.  For that matter, that injury that gave Cam a concussion (hey, a football thing!) has left him with a series of metal staples in his scalp that visually resemble, get this, the stitching of a football.  He has a head made of football.

There can be problems sometimes, I guess, with misinterpreting things as stupid-on-accident-and-therefore-bad when they're stupid-on-purpose-and-therefore-funny, but by my lights this is very clearly the latter thing, and it's very easy to just go with it, though that doesn't mean Him is ever, really, its best self, and I do think its approach is a little too much "here's my collection of artsy horror-comedy scene ideas" without sufficient material to tie it together into anything cohesive.  "Scene ideas" is already arguably pushing things too far: if it were more finessed, I'd call it a righteous structural conceit, but the first "actual scene" in the movie (that isn't more of a sutured-together flashback or fugue) doesn't come until about fifteen minutes in the movie, encompassing Cam's arrival at Isaiah's "house" and his subsequent first encounter with his peculiar mentor.  And though I've basically said outright the movie is silly as anything, it doesn't break and laugh at itself: it affects just enough of a straight-face for its absurdity to work the way Tipping wants it to, and this scene is as good as any in the film at setting that cod-serious baseline, with Cam's fearful ingress into this obviously-sinister alien fortress out in the desert that, for the record, represents maybe the best production design, at this budgetary level, of all 2025, courtesy Jordan Ferrer.  (Just Isaiah's infernal sauna alone would make it worth noting; but the whole thing is a pretty wonderful parody of the tackiness of minimalist luxury and its dumbassed futurist accessories, precisely in accord with a movie that, to the extent it wants to play with ideas any more concrete than "we men sure are fucking weird, huh?"—it'd make an interesting double-feature with F1, to which it is the opposite—spends a lot of that time mocking rich person pseudoscientific medicine and, more specifically, the vulgar technologization of athletic achievement that strips the magic and mystery of the body away and replaces it with something unpleasant and sterile, regardless of how much violence and mayhem gets consciously re-injected into it.)

But this introduction to our villain, anyway, is the first time the film slows down enough to feel like it could be telling a story, and it will be pretty much the last.  So I'll say something I usually don't, and offer that a movie could be longer and be better for it—maybe even feel a touch shorter, not that this 96-minute-movie-inclusive-of-credits is (or does feel) "too long"—just for having more of a "normal" to bounce its abnormal against; though it wouldn't even have to be much longer just to find some way to link its sequences into at least some kind of causal chain, however gauzy.  (And the gauziness is, in fact, good.)  I'm not even sure the footage in the film just couldn't be arrayed differently (it's a pretty arbitrary-feeling 96 minutes, despite a highly-theoretical structuring device of days rendered into "chapters," with their equally highly-theoretical stated "themes") to reach that result, quite possibly without even risking losing the nightmarelike softness it's obtained thanks to not having to bother much with "a plot" or "a story."

Notionally, of course, that story is Cam's seduction into darkness by Isaiah, and I suppose that's a spine upon which the rest of it hangs (this is, anyhow, "what happens in the movie" in a denotative sense).  And for the approach it's taking, let's give Withers the praise, even if it's incredibly backhanded, of providing the performance his movie has asked for, that is, an exceedingly, almost shockingly blank one, occasionally coming off like he's not even paying sufficient attention to notice that his host is being cartoonishly malevolent.  But it's the exact bad performance the movie needs, if you take my meaning, at least in the configuration it's decided to take, and this is true even if we can probably imagine a better configuration for it that would've supported a better performance at its center, quite possibly even from Withers himself.  (And even so, I'm not certain the film's very greatest mistake isn't simply leaving the compound for a scene that could've just been set at the compound and thereby maintained its delightful psychic pressure—just the B-roll of "driving on a road" feels really wrong—though it doesn't help that by this point it's heading into its endgame, and a movie that has at least always flowed with some kind of dream logic starts getting awfully, disagreeably choppy, now that it needs to grope towards some kind of climax.)  It is, if nothing else, a performance that cedes all the space in the world to the movie's star, and as I worry that if I told you that Wayans is "great," you might take that to mean he's building some layered, humane performance out of Isaiah, let's say instead he's having great fun just being a gridiron god gone psycho, raising his voice into a shriek and lowering it back into reasonable tones on a dime (with a deceptive, only-seeming randomness to it), and just generally being batshit and magnetic and, on the occasion this script permits it, giving you a glimpse of the movie that was an actual psychological thriller, that slow-boiled Cam into the state of a willing initiate into Isaiah's cult of manhood.

Which is still taking an antagonistic tack that I don't really mean, since it's complaining about it not being something else, rather than taking it on its own terms, and it achieves a lot on those; what it loses in structure it does win back with whirligig style.  I wouldn't estimate the movie is anything less than one-third music video, and Tipping, freed from all but the most gossamer shackles of "a narrative," is having a blast with gonzo imagery, from just allowing cinematographer Kira Kelly to soak in all of Ferrer's weird architecture while often bathing it in blaring solid colors (though I think it's arguable her best photography here arrives with the blinding sunlit hyperrealism of a mostly-empty football field—Isaiah has his very own football field, by the way) to some genuinely inspired freakiness in the form of magnetic resonance imagery, such as I suppose must possess its own iconic status now in the history of football, and by which I mean sequences playing out with our subjects becoming moving images of the insides of human bodies, which Tipping clearly likes too much (can't say as I blame him) to trot out just the once, so it gets a hellish-red reprise in the finale, but it hits deliriously hard that first time as mild-mannered Cam dredges up his inner monster at Isaiah's request and basically murders a guy as both of them are rendered into dehumanized ghosts.  (Also, I feel a need to shoehorn it in somewhere, and "gonzo imagery" truly is the best heading for it, so that's where we're going to put the most excellent grotesque they've made out of Julia Fox on behalf of Isaiah's influencer-or-something wife.)

And if I have sometimes lapsed into negativity, it's just a result of all of this running into the brick wall of a very bad ending.  On one hand, I understand that the movie "needs" some measure of scaffolding and an overarching evil scheme does the trick; even as it stood, it's pretty dubious that it put up that scaffolding very well, or with anything approaching care, and I have a deep suspicion that Akers & Bronkie started off with essentially a football vampire movie, even one more-or-less explicitly adapting Dracula with football players (and, frankly, maybe they should've stayed there).

This must've mutated (it's not a vampire movie—it's the opposite of a vampire movie, after a fashion), and in any case they must've been awfully reluctant to abandon their fascination with blood, though what works for a vampire doesn't necessarily work for a more novel concept, so while it's true that basically all stories are an exercise in filling up the space between a beginning and ending with "stuff" this one doesn't even take you squinting at it hard to wonder if this movie only exists because it's villain decided to spend about 80 minutes fucking around for no particular reason, while even the finale makes anti-sense in context with what was just revealed.  That itself only becomes a serious problem because it gets its two climactic scenes a little bass-ackwards: the one it actually needs to ground in some comprehensible lore, and that aforementioned conceptual scaffolding, is barely coherent; the one after that, that would very much benefit from being barely coherent, because now we've entered a whole new world of mystical football insanity, is loaded up with lore and conceptual scaffolding that you can feel the movie wishing it could violently reject, because this clearly isn't the ending the movie itself wanted at all.  And this is, I've asserted, the Peele of it: it is a happy ending, which Peele seems to have a penchant for that's unusual in a horror filmmaker, and I don't think it's nice to impose that penchant on somebody else's damn screenplay, especially not this screenplay, which isn't supposed to be remotely happy, and which might have wound up with fully three endings get all the way through post-production before they settled on the worst one, but even without a "plot" or a "story" and even without structure, still had its obvious—its satisfying—actual ending prefigured in every single scene.

Score: 7/10

P.S.: I do not like the title stylization, "HIM," so I have not used it and you can't make me.