Vague Visages’ HIM review contains minor spoilers. Justin Tipping’s 2025 movie features Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers and Julia Fox. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

For an emerging filmmaker, the Jordan Peele seal-of-approval can be both a blessing and a curse. Sure, you get to proudly trumpet that the most celebrated horror director of the past decade has produced your film in the marketing, while also setting yourself up for deeper scrutiny than you would without it, directly inviting comparisons with the Peele’s work that will typically prove unflattering. It doesn’t help matters when the second film from director Justin Tipping, following 2016’s barely seen Kicks, is playing in Peele’s recognizable wheelhouse (a social commentary-infused psychological thriller, with a sprinkling of paranoid dark comedy). Hollywood has spent the years following Get Out (2017) trying to replicate its lightning in a bottle success to little avail, contrasting with Peele’s more ambitious follow-up films drifting further from punchy, unsubtle allegories. 

It’s odd that Peele would have a hand in producing a film like HIM — a a psychological horror story about a football prospect and his aging mentor — which not only feels behind the times in the influence it’s desperately hoping to be mentioned in the same breath as, but also in its cultural critique, tackling the topic of toxic masculinity entirely through familiar tropes and ideas. HIM feels like a movie from the first Donald Trump administration that was left on the shelf and dusted off in the second, even though Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie’s screenplay — then titled “GOAT” — is a product of the Joe Biden era, appearing in the Hollywood Black List of best unproduced screenplays back in 2022. By that moment in time, there was nothing revelatory about a story which aimed to address the violent machismo of a fanbase whose rallying cry of “God, Family, Football” is not an insignificant factor in supporters finding themselves on the far-right of various culture wars. In 2025, these overt criticisms don’t break any new ground, except perhaps to an intended audience of male sports fans.

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Tipping opens HIM with an on-the-nose flashback of a very young Cameron Cade (played as an adult by Tyriq Withers) seeing a particularly graphic injury onscreen at the Super Bowl, his father forcing him not to look away, telling him that this is an important lesson about sacrifices and greatness. Even though Cameron’s dad leaves the picture, it’s a lesson the protagonist takes to heart, growing up to be talked about as the next big thing. However, a significant head injury after a fan attack (before a major scouting event) has many speculating he could fall short of becoming the new GOAT fans and pundits predict he could be. Step in the athlete’s sleazy manager (an underused but effectively OTT Tim Heidecker), who arranges for Cameron to spend a week training with the recently retired quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) at his secluded desert compound. If you’ve seen The Menu (2022) or Opus (2025), then you know the exact trajectory the narrative takes — the near mythical celebrity is not-so-secretly a monster with ulterior motives, which gradually becomes clear over a week of specially tailored practice sessions.

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What Tipping lacks in surprises, he does at least make up for in visceral set pieces. One training session, designed for Cam to perfect his passing speed, has the motivation of a football being pelted directly at a younger player’s face at increasingly fast speeds from a very close range. It is a paranoid sequence which reflects HIM at its best yet also highlights the inherent problem — it’s hard to sustain that feeling of paranoia when the audience is already five steps ahead of the antagonist’s plan, having seen this narrative formula play out in a similar fashion so many times recently. Tipping — who significantly re-wrote the original GOAT screenplay — doesn’t make it as obvious as the aforementioned films thematically, straying from an obvious “eat the rich” throughline, with his few attempts at celebrity satire being the film’s most embarrassing attempts at social commentary. Take Julia Fox’s character Elsie, the wife and social media manager of Isaiah, who is introduced touting a new Goop-like product. It goes without saying that parodying Gwyneth Paltrow’s unhinged range of wellness products in the year 2025 does not suggest a film with its finger on the pulse of culture.

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HIM’s unsubtle parody sits uneasily next to the increasingly surreal narrative direction, with the heightened nature of various nightmare sequences and a training regime which aims to tie current sports culture back to the gladiatorial arenas of Ancient Rome appearing incongruous with a straightforward allegory which offers no new analysis of the toxic masculinity inherent to the sport. The third act evolves into a full-blown bloodbath, making the gladiatorial connection even more overt in its imagery, but does so in a way that doesn’t enticingly complicate what has been up until then a disappointingly simplistic satire, instead getting so drawn into the chaos it winds up falling enamored with the same machismo it wants to critique. I suspect Tipping would argue that this is a full-circle moment, the protagonist proving unable to escape the teachings embedded at him at a young age in the prologue. But that comes across as empty when the director wants viewers to revel in the suddenly blackly comic splatter violence of it all — hardly a finger wagging at the surrounding culture when it’s this exhilarating to witness.

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Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of HIM is that Tipping is clearly a talented visual stylist, but his keen eye never quite helps the screenplay transcend various cliches. I’m still interested to see what he makes next, as there’s not enough in his sophomore film to suggest he’s been prematurely knocked out on the pitch just yet.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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