Review: HIM

Director:  Justin Tipping

Stars:  Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers, Julia Fox

Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) is the GOAT quarterback of all time. In a career spanning 30 years in the USFF (because we can’t say ‘NFL’) he’s overcome injury and adversity to remain a consistent force for his team, the San Antonio Saints. But now retirement looms. In an effort to pass the baton, Isaiah cherry-picks young hopeful Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) – fresh from a nasty brain injury himself – to spend a week with him at his reclusive desert ranch, over which he will impart the precious knowledge and skills he has accumulated to his prodigal Chosen One.

That’s the pitch, anyway, in Justin Tipping’s sophomore feature and first for Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions. Peele can’t help but seem a little like the Isaiah to Tipping’s Cameron here, bringing a relatively unknown talent to a mass audience through association. The marketing for HIM leans particularly hard on Peele’s established brand. And yes, HIM is most certainly a horror film. One that you’ve probably seen most of before, and one you’ll probably come away from unsure what you’ve seen at all.

A young, talented Black hopeful invited to a mysterious, secluded, cultish hacienda ran by a messianic celebrity, Mark Anthony Green’s Opus only came out 7 months ago, and it faced an uphill struggle with originality then. HIM is a further iteration of an increasingly withering formula. Of course no cell phones are allowed. Of course there are suspicious looking hieroglyphs on the walls everywhere. It’s become procedural now. Dull. But there’s hope for HIM, for a while, because it’s tapping into something relatively unspoken, particularly in mainstream horror pictures.

Cameron represents the best of his generation in terms of physical fitness, in terms of dedication. HIM reflects back America’s uneasy relationship to the Black sports star, admired yet feared, and makes some effort to explore layers of fetishisation and exploitation inherent in both the industry and the fandom. Taking a cue from Peele’s own Get Out, perhaps, it makes pointed use of the descriptor “beast”, a loaded term that can feel weaponised to strip African American men of their humanity. Here, however, there’s a double play going on, as Isaiah’s flimsily realised cabal give off all kinds of wishy-washy satanic vibes. In HIM, being the GOAT might literally mean being The Goat.

Good news, non-sports fans: it turns out there’s actually very little American Football practice in Isaiah’s itinerary for the week, save for a ludicrously savage exercise in taking one for the team. Much of the mid-section is taken up by Isaiah playing mind games with the increasingly confused Cameron, setting him various traps to disobey established rules, or just shooting (the) shit out in the desert. Wayans takes the MVP award. He’s put a lot into Isaiah, and has been a consistently charismatic presence throughout his career, even when playing the obnoxious clown. He’s always had range. It’s a long walk from Scary Movie to Requiem for a Dream. HIM matches and maybe beats latter day career highs like Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks, and Wayans can step away here satisfied that he Stepped Up. 

Indeed, there’s no lack of effort. Julia Fox and Tim Heidecker are putting their all into their respective extremely-over-the-top roles, seemingly keyed in exactly to the tone Tipping is going for, arguably with more confidence. And the up-and-coming Withers gives character to Cameron, mixing something conniving and ambitious into what is often a lamb-to-the-slaughter role. 

What’s less convincing, however, is what in the fuck is going on here. This thing has been absolutely butchered in post, and it frequently feels as though we should be seeing “Scene Missing” intertitles to at least forgive the staccato jumps from scene to scene, shot to shot. HIM is a deeply confused and – by extension – confusing experience, taking on a lot thematically, but seemingly incapable of articulating an actual narrative. The editing goes from twitchy to incomprehensible, until the viewer is beaten into submission and a slurry of cult horror tropes are loosed to bury us alive. There are visually interesting ideas in the mix. Tipping has taken his cues, clearly, from the kind of high-ticket advertising that orbits professional sports, creating something sleek and compact like an Adidas promo… but with all the coherence of a 3-minute music video teased out to a pummeling 90.

The barrage of visuals is bracing and carries us through, but the mix of recycled tropes comes to feel like wading through a bargain bin of over-familiar tat. Oh look, it’s the pig masks from Saw. Here’s a bit of indoctrinated sacrifice from Midsommar. Surely that broken bone hurts and this character will react accordingly? Oh, no. The bludgeoning effect of HIM ultimately beat this viewer into submission. When the third act bloodbath occurred, it was all meaningless, and chocked full of terrible edits that made simply tracking characters in the space a pointless exercise. What happens to Julia Fox’s Elsie, for instance, is as stupid as it is mystifying because the coverage isn’t there.

Which is a shame, because there are ideas here and themes worth exploring. But HIM fundamentally doesn’t know how to do those things, not in any way that feels substantive, meaningful or cogently held together. Too many scenes rest on Cameron’s confusion as a convenient exit strategy. The reveals are somehow both lumpenly obvious and barely decipherable. It’s like watching any number of better-made movies on 1.5 speed while someone perpetually distracts you. You can’t help but think you’ve missed something that isn’t really there.