Tyriq Withers and Marlon Wayons Scrimmage Through Cheerless Football Horror Fumble
DIRECTED BY JUSTIN TIPPING/2025
When it comes to grappling with tricky films, many people don’t want to play games. We film critics are here to help. As the minds behind the great site Film Colossus smarty observe, “if you compare the beginning [of a film] to the end, narrative and thematic intention becomes clear.” This method is quite enlightening, shedding light on otherwise oblique films such as the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men and Ari Aster’s Eddington. (Which are Film Colossus’s examples). The new film Him, from director Justin Tipping, existing largely in the shadow of another Ari Aster film, Midsommar, stands as a candidate in need of such a reading. Let’s give it a sporting try…
Him begins and ends the same way: with shots of three American fighter jets, flying in formation, shooting over a football stadium as they release fat, puffy trails of red, white, or blue smoke. Knowing that whenever a U.S. flag (or iconography thereof) is included within any given shot of any given film that it’s deliberately a statement of some sort, Tipping is blasting basic symbolism from Him’s kickoff. It’s militarized, high-flying, Top Gun-infused ‘Merican flag symbolism over an imposing enclosure to ‘Merica’s concussive and regressively conservative pastime. These colors don’t run, they dissipate. And rather quickly at that.
So, masculinity, militarism, the commercial football machine, the fact that said machine is inseparable from much of the nation’s populace, and the airborne colors of said nation disappearing into the air on account of being nothing but smoke… Got it. Didn’t get it? Don’t worry, they’ll be back for another pass with the same patriotic vapor trail at the end. Still don’t get it? Spoiler alert: Professional football, and the country that enables it so profusely, is nothing but a hyper-masculine facade of sound and fury, all fleeting and impersonal.
So, to be as gratingly repetitive as the movie itself, we’re dealing with an assertively critical end zone run at the subject of America via the thick veneer of pro football. (Note that the NFL clearly wanted nothing to do with this, as Him goes on to depict the organization as literally pagan in its evil ways). Which is fine- this isn’t the first movie to be about those things, and it won’t be the last. The issue is, as the late critic Roger Ebert put it, that movies aren’t really about what they’re about, but rather how they’re about it.
Him leads fully with its juvenile-level intellectualism, all symbolism and thematics at the expense of anything personal or human. From the flags to the many medieval devil figures to the Dante’s Inferno-esque training camp, it’s all painfully obvious if you ask me. But Tipping and company don’t think so. This, sports fans, is serious. To sit through them telling it, this whole movie is deeply, darkly, smartly, vitally profound. No laughing matter at any point in the game. Masochists, rejoice!
Sold as an engaging, challenging, Faustian sports horror film by Jordan Peele, Him is actually none of those things. It is instead an overlong aggressively and pointlessly unpleasant beatdown. Visually, it bears the corrosive dingy aesthetic of an old Nine Inch Nails music video but set in a satanic athletic facility. Formally, it embraces blink-fast gory inserts and a myriad of other overtly sensory-trying gimmickry. Some of it is momentarily interesting, but all of it is as fugacious as that red, white, and blue jet smoke. The film stars Tyriq Withers as a promising young draft pick hampered by a weird devil attack on the football field, and Marlon Wayans as the aging superstar he grew up admiring. Julia Fox, Tim Heidecker, and Jim Jefferies are also in this. All are different blocks of wood and/or human pyrotechnics amid all the smelly pigskin.
Saying “Let’s be introspective about football” is like saying “Let’s be respectful about politics”- it’s probably a big sack. I’m not a sporty guy, but I think I’d know my way around football. If I wanted to watch a viscerally overcooked and outwardly ridiculous film about pro football that’s really about what’s wrong with America, I’d watch one that I actually like, which is Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday. That one has a certain beauty in its bombastic convulsiveness. Him, on the other hand, wallows in its pentagrams and push-ups. It’s like an incongruous game of inches that extends nowhere. Nor is it any fun whatsoever. Already other directors are trying to tackle Ari Aster’s scary territory, and this is what we get. Hard pass. I’m officially calling an offsides, a swing and a miss, and a trip to the penalty box for all players involved.