HIM Spoiler-free Review
by Cineman and Morgan Morris
Cineman was joined by our friend Morgan Morris to see a pre-release screening of HIM, the feature directorial debut of Justin Tipping, produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, which produced Get Out and other fan favourites. The film releases in cinemas this weekend. Check out what the squad had to say, and if it’s worth a trip to the theatre.
CINEMAN
Justin Tipping’s HIM is not a film that plays it safe, and that’s precisely its strength. Taking direct aim at America’s most sacred institution, football, Tipping dares to dissect the mythology and cultural machinery surrounding the sport. It’s a bold creative choice, one that may alienate American audiences who view he game as a religion. But for viewers willing to look past that, HIM is an audacious work that blends satire, absurdism, and visual spectacle into something distinctive, making it a solid feature directorial debut.
On the surface, some might accuse the film of being light on plot, character depth, or symbolic excavation. Yet that critique misses the point. Tipping doesn’t spoon-feed meaning; instead, he places you in the confused and damaged mind (and brain) of the protagonist to navigate your way through the story. Like football itself, the film thrives on rhythm, momentum, and sudden collisions. It gives you enough fragments of character and imagery to piece together an throughline, trusting the audience to do the heavy lifting.
The visuals alone are worth the price of admission. Shot on a budget of under $30 million, HIM looks far more expensive. The cinematography is dazzling, finding surreal beauty in isolated settings and leaning into dreamlike compositions. By confining the action mostly to a single location over the course of one week, Tipping and his team stretch every dollar to maximum effect.
Where the film truly separates itself is in tone. Despite being a thriller (touted as a horror), it refuses to shy away from humour, instead barrelling headlong into absurdism. The casting choices underline this: Marlon Wayans plays his role with a sly wink, Julia Fox leans into the heightened artifice of the it girl she had been considered in real life, and even Tyriq Withers’ presence feels like a meta-joke, especially when recalling his Atlanta turn as a mixed-race teen trying to prove his Blackness to get a scholarship. Every jab at sporting culture is deliberate, every exaggeration sharpened to expose the hollowness beneath the spectacle. The film is in on its own joke, and that self-awareness is part of the thrill.
That said, HIM isn’t flawless. At under two hours, it feels like it could have used an additional thirty minutes to fully explore the characters and give the protagonist’s arc more gravity. The imagery is striking, but without more narrative depth, some of the emotional payoff lands softer than the brutal impact you’d expect.
Still, in a landscape of safe, studio sports dramas, HIM dares to be irreverent, weird, and uncompromising. It’s a film that wrestles with the very mythology of American sport, even as it laughs at it. Tipping may not have scored a perfect touchdown here, but he’s certainly moved the ball into daring, uncharted territory.
Cineman’s Rating: 7/10
MORGAN MORRIS
Masterpieces don’t always have to make sense.
Christopher Nolan’s Tenet was hailed as such by audiences and critics alike despite, I will insist, no one outside the director’s immediate family understanding what the hell was going on. Jean-Luc Godard, beloved by this writer and many more filmmakers, has annoyed and confounded with his films, but who would deny the French filmmaker a place among world cinema’s pantheon of greats.
And these filmmakers, and their films, get away with it because they have something to offer as trade-off for your confusion.
Take Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, described more than once on its release in 1975 as “incomprehensible”. But the film has is now considered the Russian director’s magnum opus, its dreamy dream sequences showered with praise. Some critics hated Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now upon its release, describing it as “an adventure yarn with delusions of grandeur” and “emotionally obtuse and intellectually empty”. Yet we now know it as an adored and nightmarish road trip into the banality, stupidity and evil that is war. Ditto for David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, matched only in bewildering mind-fuckery by the third season of Twin Peaks and the WTF-edness of Rabbit.
Sometimes, clearly, the world just needs time to warm to a film, to let it simmer in communal psyche until we fall off a donkey and get our Damascene conversion.
So, in short, I may yet be proven wrong about Him, the latest production from Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions. For now, I am willing to bet good money that it will not, in time, be considered anything than it is – a confusing, poorly patched together mess, and a tortured study in vacuous religious imagery.
There’s pretence about having a story early on. Ostensibly something to do with a rookie footballer (the American kind), a dead father, and a veteran player facing the prospect of the curtains dropping on his glory days.
Then things get religious, something Americans obsess about, even as they cook up their own. Plot, structure and coherence are soon abandoned for the sake of symbolism. Not meaningful symbolism, of course, just the kind that looks good in saturated colours. To be honest, the whole thing would have worked better as a music video.
Tyriq Withers and his captivating mixed-race features, so memorably deployed in an episode of Donald Glover’s Atlanta, is wasted here. And what looked, from trailers, to be Marlon Wayans’ coming-out-as-a-real-actor performance – perhaps comparable to that of Dwayne Johnson in the upcoming The Smashing Machine – will now, sadly, be overlooked and forgotten as soon as this film deserves to be.
Morgan’s Rating: 3/10
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