Him Review: A Horror Movie Fumble

If I were Jordan Peele and I had just lost the bidding war to the script for Weapons, and someone on my management team said, “At least we have Him!”, I would have parted ways with them too.

From Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions comes a new horror movie that enters the world of athletics. Justin Tipping co-writes and directs this film about Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), an up-and-coming football star who gets to train with the football player he idolized as a kid: Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). But as you may have guessed, things begin to get twisted. This project is a rare miss for Monkeypaw, as this is one of the weakest horror movies of the year. It’s disappointing and it completely fumbles the ball on how to achieve greatness in horror.

The setup is pretty good. We open with a young Cam watching Isaiah play on TV as Isaiah gets painfully injured. Years later, Cam is a football player dreaming of becoming the GOAT. But in an early scene, which should have been directed with a lot more suspense, mystery, and tension, someone in a weird outfit whacks Cam in the head. With staples in his head, he can’t risk another traumatic brain injury, but getting to train under his hero is his shot at getting everything he wanted. So you’d think Him would push him to dark places as he makes more horrifying choices to get what he wants, right? Well, if this were a good movie, it would.

This is a “nothing” movie. It’s less concerned with pushing its protagonist into dark places, and just goes for cheap scares. This movie has a good idea here and there. During one early practice scene, when a player messes up, another person must stand somewhere and get a football launched directly into their face, and we watch them get bloodier and bloodier. That’s a dark idea, especially as Isaiah eggs this on. But it doesn’t go far enough. The film should have made Cam more directly responsible for this person’s pain. Make Cam be the one who launches that football! Instead, Cam worries about it the next scene and then never talks about it for the rest of the movie.

When Him leans into more grounded horror scenarios, it works a bit better. There’s a cult of Isaiah’s fans that camp near his compound and are desperate for his attention. That’s a disturbing idea; exploring unhealthy parasocial relationships with public figures is a strong idea for a horror film. But the way they’re directed—they’re almost mythical creatures or possessed by demons with how they look and behave. It’s a good idea executed badly, and that sums up much of my issues with this movie.

The second act of any three-act film often features “fun and games,” where the protagonist explores the world and faces some obstacles, successes, and failures. In a horror movie, you can have tons of fun and games. An audience knows the house is haunted by now, so the director can just keep scaring them over and over again. The fun and games in Him are not very fun. We have our occasional scares, but most of them are just happening in Cam’s head. They’re also just not scary. There isn’t a single memorable piece of horror imagery in this movie. It’s pretty awful.

Withers is generally good as the protagonist. This is his first time leading a movie like this, so there’s a lot riding on his shoulders. Overall, this isn’t exactly a star turn for him because the script isn’t good enough and he doesn’t display enough charisma to win us over. Marlon Wayans is a fun casting choice here. When people think of Wayans’s contribution to the horror genre, they’re likely going to think of him as Shorty in Scary Movie. Before we see him return to the hilarious parody movie series in next year’s sequel, it’s nice to see Wayans once again play against type.

Wayans is a gifted actor, and he gets to have his humorous moments, but mainly, there’s a darkness brewing underneath the surface of this character. It’s not as memorable as his dramatic turn in Requiem for a Dream, but he hams it up here and gets to be intimidating from time to time. But the movie completely fails to explore their relationship with each other. Going into this film, I knew I was going to get something in the lines of Whiplash and Black Swan, but with football instead of drumming and ballet. But Him couldn’t care less about getting darker and scarier from a thematic perspective. Most of the second act is one-note; a scare here and there, and Isaiah acting strangely.

Everything culminates into a super rushed final act. This final act is horrendous. It’s where I almost completely checked out of the film. It rushes through a character conflict and doesn’t do anything remotely intelligent. We have our big reveal, and it feels so insignificant in this narrative. There’s virtually no pay-off to anything that’s been set up. And eventually, the whole film turns violent. Violence can be shocking and graphic, but here, it’s so over-the-top that it becomes a live-action cartoon. We’re talking Kill Bill levels of ridiculousness. It’s such a strange way to end the movie, with buckets of blood spewing from characters we do not care about in the slightest. The performances and the costumes in those last 10 minutes are some of the most hysterical things I’ve witnessed all year.

What was Him even trying to say? The whole theme that they keep mentioning seems to be that greatness demands sacrifice. By the end of the movie, very little greatness has been achieved and very few sacrifices have been made. So what was the point of it all? Nothing. Him is a nothing movie that gave us nothing. If you’re looking for a touchdown, you won’t find it here.