Justin Tipping makes male ambition look physically dangerous, and his images can hurt. We are less convinced by his storytelling: HIM finds force in bodily damage, then loses it in blunt symbolism and muddled plotting.
Fi1m perspective
The X-ray-style violence in HIM (2025) shows the bodily damage behind American football's promises of greatness. We winced because Tipping makes those injuries difficult to dismiss as part of the sporting spectacle. It is a sound subject for horror: the physical punishment is already there, without anything supernatural having to happen. Tipping can make that punishment unpleasant to watch, but he struggles to turn it into sustained suspense. We cannot recommend HIM, though there is enough force in its images to keep us interested in his work.
His feature debut, Kicks (2016), co-written with Joshua Beirne-Golden, put masculinity, violence and possessions inside an East Bay coming-of-age story. The link with HIM is clear in his attention to young men and the pressures that shape what they want. Between those features, he directed television episodes, including Dear White People (2019) and Flatbush Misdemeanors (2021). His return to features took those concerns into sports horror. That move makes sense, but the difficulty is keeping our attention once we understand that greatness comes at a cost.
Kira Kelly's dark cinematography gives HIM an atmosphere in which sporting ambition feels unsafe. Marlon Wayans supplies a threatening human presence, and Tipping gets more menace from him than from the religious imagery. That imagery broadly suggests that football has become a faith without clarifying what the film thinks about its demands. When the film attends to bodily injury, its criticism has something specific to work with. We would rather it stayed with that damage a little longer.
The screenplay Tipping wrote with Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie keeps returning to brutality and sacrifice without making either more interesting. Its supernatural plotting is vague, yet its broader direction is easy to predict, an awkward combination for a horror film. Taylor Joy Mason's editing cannot impose much order on the competing demands of football, horror and commentary. The film keeps changing its way of presenting the subject when it needs to develop the story. For the next feature, a scene that builds suspense would be more welcome than another symbol.
Biography
Justin Tipping is an American film and television director, screenwriter and executive producer. He directed and co-wrote the feature Kicks (2016) and the sports horror film HIM (2025), on which he is also credited as writer. He has directed episodes of series including Dear White People (2017–2019), Black Monday (2019), The Chi (2018–2019), Flatbush Misdemeanors (2021) and Joe vs. Carole (2022).
Tipping earned an MFA in directing from the American Film Institute Conservatory, where his short film Nani (2012) won a Student Academy Award. He is of Filipino and Scandinavian descent and was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area.
