Him (2025 | USA | 96 minutes | Justin Tipping)
Not to mix sports metaphors, but if nothing else Him, the feature film debut of director Justin Tipping, represents a genuine swing for the fences.
Tipping and co-writers Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie are obviously attempting to stage a frontal assault on professional sports and toxic masculinity. It’s an inverse spiritual kin to Coralie Fargeat’s blunt-force takedown of patriarchy-imposed aging fears and beauty standards in The Substance.
Put both films head-to-head on the field, and Him invariably falls well short of Fargeat’s sustained nightmare-satiric vision. But Tipping’s directorial bow still works (to these eyes, at least) as a stylized dark fable, anchored by two great central performances.
The movie follows Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), a promising young quarterback on the cusp of being recruited by a national football team when a traumatic head injury threatens to permanently derail his ambitions. Enter Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), an iconic pro player who offers Cameron a shot at redemption via a week of rigorous hardline training.
Along the way, Cameron encounters a gallery of fans, weirdos, wannabes, and puppet masters aligned with (or sponging off of) his superstar jock mentor. Worse yet, White’s training methods quickly grow from rigorous to strange to horrific.
Yes, Him is essentially retelling Faust, jacked on testosterone, with several heaping scoops of heavy-handed symbolism piled on top. Yes, it lacks subtlety (The major league team recruiting Cam is named the San Antonio Saviors, FFS). No, it’s not always cohesive. Yes, it kinda goes bugnuts (and maybe not in a controlled way) in its final minutes. And no, it will not satisfy anyone looking for anything remotely resembling a typical sports movie.
All of the above liabilities can and do still resolutely apply, but fables (or, to traffic in cliché, dark fairy tales) can still resonate, even in the most ragged of forms. And Him lays out a pretty captivating fable—flaws, familiarity and all.
Tipping’s and cinematographer Kira Kelly’s obscenely glossy visual style simultaneously fetishizes and effectively satirizes cliché sports/advertising imagery. That’s furthered by Taylor Mason’s editing, which often rides shotgun with those cliches. Think ESPN, Sunday Night Football, and every sports-celeb endorsement commercial in existence, being forcibly dragged through a really warped funhouse mirror, and you’re running in the right playing field.
Tipping and Kelly craft some increasingly chaotic, disorienting and frightening visuals that vividly convey the increasingly chaotic, disorienting, and frightening behavior of Isaiah White and his entourage. And if the symbolism’s a sometimes-unfocused barrage of biblical references, messianic imagery, racial signifiers, and storybook easter eggs, Tipping and company imbue it all with incredible style, entertainingly over-the-top gore, and a palpable sense of dream logic. The movie also yields enough little details to portend some rewarding repeat views (small wonder that Jordan Peele, with his detail-dense style of statement horror, produced this).
Most of the movie focuses on the dynamic between Cam and White, but there are plenty of darkly-humorous characters inhabiting the periphery, all acted with dark humor by a solid supporting cast. White’s libertine influencer wife Elsie (Julia Fox), Cam’s slick yes-man manager Tom (Tim and Eric co-creator Tim Heidecker), and White’s personal physician Marco (Jim Jefferies) all further the fable/fairy tale ambience—Lewis Carroll or Brothers Grimm characters dragged through that same warped funhouse mirror.
Best of all, the core dynamic between the two principals could hardly be more combustibly watchable. Withers’ Cameron begins as a cipher, then reveals layers of uncertain vulnerability as he navigates the increasingly unsettling physical and emotional terrain around him. And Wayans creates a world-class antagonist in the charismatic, enigmatic, and shit-your-pants scary Isaiah White.
Him fell far short with audiences and critics on its opening weekend, and it’s probably too rough around the edges, overly ambitious, and weird to fully satisfy an undiscerning audience. But even the most broadly-drawn fables can still connect on a visceral level, and Him, in its own admittedly flawed but compelling way, does just that. As I write this, an unhinged, incompetent leader is selling a moldering, toxic vision of traditional masculinity (and win-at-all-costs callousness) to American men. And an alarming number of them are buying it. Any movie that calls bullshit on that grotesquerie—while rocking a dark-fairy tale gridiron jersey, no less—deserves some props.
Him is currently in wide release in theaters everywhere. Image courtesy MonkeyPaw Productions.