HIM Is on Netflix Now and We Have Thoughts (Mostly About Marlon Wayans)Posted by Fear & Wine | Horror Reviews | Stream This

Look. We watched HIM when it dropped in theaters last September.

We recorded a whole episode about it. And now that it's finally hit Netflix, quietly, like a quarterback who just sold his soul and is hoping nobody notices, we feel it's our duty to send you directly to that episode before you hit play.

Here's our completely earnest breakdown.

The Setup Is Actually Great. We Mean That.

A young football player named Cam Cade (Tyriq Withers) takes a career-ending hit, then gets a call from his idol — the legendary, magnetic, eight-time championship quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). Isaiah invites Cam to train at his isolated compound for a week.

That's it. That's the premise. And honestly? We were in. The Faustian bargain setup is one of horror's oldest and most satisfying structures for a reason. You know it's a deal with the devil. The character knows something is wrong. The audience just has to watch them walk into it anyway, step by step, because the thing being offered is too intoxicating to refuse.

Football is genuinely the perfect vessel for this story. The sport already is a Faustian bargain dressed in shoulder pads, you sacrifice your body, your brain, your autonomy, your entire identity in exchange for glory and a shot at being called the GOAT. The horror isn't a metaphor. It's just the rest of the contract showing up to collect.

We loved that angle. We talked about it at length. It's the part of this film that works, and it works hard.

Football as Religion: The Subtext That Refused to Stay Sub

Director Justin Tipping clearly wanted to make a film about football as a cult, the rituals, the sacrifices, the mythology of masculine greatness, the way ownership literally treats players as vessels for something beyond themselves. There's a recreation of the Last Supper in this movie. The Last Supper. Someone in the theater apparently burst out laughing involuntarily when it appeared on screen, and honestly, same.

Here's our hot take: that instinct was correct, and the execution was almost there.

The X-ray sequences, where the camera literally shows you the inside of a player's body as it takes damage, are genuinely disturbing and conceptually sharp. The score by Bobby Krlic (The Haxan Cloak, a name horror nerds will recognize from Hereditary) is doing a lot of heavy lifting and doing it well.

The problem is that somewhere around the third act, the film stops trusting you to feel the dread and just... explains it. Out loud. At volume. The subtext becomes text becomes a speech. And we get it, you want people to understand what you were going for, but when a horror film has to spell out its own themes, the spell breaks.

We're not saying it had to be Get Out levels of precision. But it was trying to be, and the finish line was right there.

The Marlon Wayans Discourse

This is where we spent some quality time on the episode, because Marlon Wayans in this film is a genuinely interesting casting decision that people are way too quick to dismiss.

The critical consensus seems to be: wrong guy for the role, doesn't have the weight, somebody like Mahershala Ali would've been more intimidating. And look, we understand that note. We do.

But here's what we think those critics are missing: Isaiah White is supposed to be charismatic first and monstrous second. The whole seduction of the premise requires that you understand why Cam would follow this man into increasingly unhinged territory. Wayans has genuine screen magnetism. The charm is load-bearing.

Where it gets complicated is that the film also needs Isaiah to terrify you, and that transition doesn't fully land. It's not that Wayans can't do menace, he can, it's that the script doesn't give him a clean through-line to follow. One moment he's a god, the next he's a red flag parade, the next he's doing something that would have any sane person running for the exit, and Cam just... keeps training.

We talked about this at length in the episode because it's interesting, not because it's simply bad. There's a version of this performance that works completely. This version works about 70% of the time.

Julia Fox Said What She Said

In a film struggling with tonal consistency, Julia Fox as Elsie White, the celebrity influencer wife who clearly knows exactly what her husband is, is operating on a completely different frequency and it works (for most of us... Kelli not so much)

She's giving you menace with a content creator aesthetic and we are here for every second of it. Someone give this woman a villain role she can really chew on, please.

So Is It Worth Watching?

Yes. But go in informed.

HIM is a film that had a genuinely great idea, some genuinely great moments, and a third act that trips over its own ambitions. The critics aren't wrong that it fumbles the execution. But the dismissive reviews also aren't fully right, because there's real craft here, in the cinematography, the score, the concept, and in the performances when the script gets out of their way.

It's the kind of movie that's fun to watch with someone who wants to talk about it after. Which is, conveniently, exactly what we are. However, if you are afraid of sports' mascots like Alisan, this is not the film for you!!

🎙️ Listen to Our Episode

We broke this one down in full: the Faustian structure, why football-as-religion should have landed harder, the Wayans debate, and all the moments where the film almost became something truly great.

Listen on Spotify →

If you're watching HIM on Netflix this weekend, listen to the episode first, or immediately after — either way, you'll want the commentary. We promise we're better company than Cam's mother, who is introduced in act one and then forgotten by the script entirely.

Fear & Wine is a horror and wine podcast hosted by four women who take the horror very seriously and the wine equally seriously. New episodes drop regularly. Follow us wherever you listen to podcasts.