HIM (2025) has a killer logline and nothing to back it up. The Jordan Peele-backed football horror imagines a dynastic franchise as a literal cult, then treats that premise like a slogan rather than a story. Justin Tipping directs with grave importance and a nonstop barrage of portentous imagery, yet the movie never establishes rules for its horror or a worldview sharp enough to qualify as satire. It is all pose, no pulse.
Cameron Cade, played by Tyriq Withers, is a once promising quarterback still reeling from a traumatic head injury when the San Antonio Saviors offer him one last shot. The condition is a week of “training” at the private compound of the league’s living legend Isaiah White, played by Marlon Wayans. What follows should be a descent into the machinery that chews up young athletes, but the film replaces ideas with shock cuts and contrived set pieces. Drills that threaten bodily harm, needle montages, and confessionals about sacrifice keep insisting on meaning the script has not earned.
Tipping leans hard on symbolism, then undercuts it with clumsy execution. An on the nose Last Supper tableau is laughable when it should be chilling. A sauna confrontation that ought to be the film’s psychological hinge is so choppily assembled it barely scans. The compound’s rituals feel invented from scene to scene, which drains the tension instead of escalating it. It is the rare horror film where more style makes everything feel thinner.
Performances cannot locate a consistent tone. Withers is stranded by a character written as a bundle of reactions, and Wayans vacillates between sinister guru and motivational poster without a coherent line through either mode. The only person who seems to understand that HIM needs a little blind outrageousness to survive is Julia Fox as Isaiah’s wife, who plays the part with a knowing, campy bite the rest of the movie resists in favor of self-importance.
Monkeypaw Productions taking a swing on a sports cult chiller is an intriguing prospect on paper, and you can see the outlines of a sharper film about the physical and spiritual costs of the game. What made projects like Get Out and Nope work under Jordan Peele’s umbrella was not just premise, it was precision. HIM confuses severity for substance and noise for thrill, and by the time it reaches for a grand statement about faith and fame, you are left with a pile of half formed notions and a lot of sweat-slicked closeups.
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There is risk in championing new storytellers and oddball genre hybrids. There is also value in letting a concept bake until it has bite. HIM barrels ahead anyway, and the result is a misfire that feels unfinished in conception and ungainly in execution, less a movie than a highlight reel of empty gestures.
Score: 1/10
HIM (2025)
- Cast: Tyriq Withers, Marlon Wayans, Julia Fox, Tim Heidecker, Jim Jefferies
- Director: Justin Tipping
- Genre: Horror, Mystery, Sports
- Runtime: 96 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: September 19, 2025
- Movies Like HIM: Infinity Pool, Trap, 28 Years Later, More Movies Like HIM
