There are few movies in 2025 that make a stronger first impression than Him, the newest film from director Justin Tipping and producer Jordan Peele. The visual hook of Him is immediate, a grotesque reframing of the aesthetics found in Nike commercials where quarterbacks show off their shoes while darting around agility ladders. Combined with environments and lifestyles reminiscent of cursed Instagram reels and TikToks where influencers show their “morning routine,” Him carves out one of the most unique styles of any cult horror movie I’ve seen. The real-world aesthetics of elite gatherings have always lent themselves to horror, but the addition of high-level athlete compounds and parties is new to the cult horror sub-genre.
Unfortunately, Him has little else new to offer to the sub-genre than those aesthetics. As Him’s brisk 96-minute-runtime ticks down, it becomes sadly clear that a short-hand description of the film like “Hereditary, but with football” is more accurate than you’d hope. Despite the best efforts of its cast and the aforementioned visuals, Him never escapes the shadows of its clear influences. For a film where characters speak about transcending the game they play, Him doesn’t come close to those sorts of ambitions.
Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) is a star quarterback with a big problem. Despite being seen as one of the most promising football stars of his generation, Cameron’s future is thrown into disarray after he’s mysteriously attacked. Cameron took a brutal hit to the head that could take him out of the game for good, until his agent (Tim Heidecker) is able to broker the deal of a lifetime. Cameron’s football idol, Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), wants to personally train him for one week. There are rumors that Isaiah is planning on retiring, effectively meaning that Cameron could be his replacement if the training goes well. Cut off from the rest of the world, Cameron begins his training in Isaiah’s compound in the desert and witnesses the dangerous routine that’s made Isaiah the greatest quarterback of his generation.
There’s a smattering of other characters throughout, such as Isaiah’s wife, Elsie (Julia Fox), and Isaiah’s mysterious doctor (Jim Jeffries), but most of the film’s focus is on Withers as Cameron and Wayans as Isaiah. It’s a mostly smart call on the part of the film because Marlon Wayans is having a blast playing Isaiah. Not that the order of a film’s credits are the end-all be-all of how important an actor is to a movie, but there’s good reason for Marlon Wayans to receive top billing despite not being the lead character. Wayans has never played a character like this before, a charismatic maniac who can jump between menacing and nurturing at the drop of a hat.
Wayans’ massive swing of a performance feels calculated to make up for how passive and subdued Tyriq Withers’ is throughout most of the movie. There are a few scattered moments where Withers shows his range as an actor, but the character of Cameron is flatter than the desert that surrounds Isaiah’s compound. Even the greatest actors of Tyriq Withers’ age range and build would struggle to find much depth in Cameron, a fault of a script that feels underdeveloped once the second half of the movie kicks in.
Frustratingly, the first half of Him is a solid foundation to build a great second half of a movie on top of. One of the best scenes in the movie is within the first half when Isaiah gives Cameron a lecture on the history of quarterbacks in football. It’s a genuinely interesting anecdote that deepens the themes Him seems poised to tackle for the rest of the film. Unfortunately, it ends up being the only interesting conversation of its kind as Him piles up hallucinatory sequences that can only be explained by insanity or supernatural occurrences. With the cult imagery rearing its head early on in the film, it’s an easy guess which of those two possibilities ends up being true.
That’s not to say that there aren’t any problems in the first half of Him, one of the biggest ones being how it handles Cameron’s backstory. There are plenty of glimpses of Cameron’s family life before he arrives at Isaiah’s compound that provide motivation for his character, especially where Cameron’s dead father is concerned. His father is so important to the story that he’s the only family member who appears again via flashbacks across the entire runtime. However, Cameron’s still-living mother, brother, and girlfriend are neglected by the movie completely.
Him quickly isolates Cameron from his family once he arrives at Isaiah’s compound; His cellphone is confiscated and his mother, brother, and girlfriend all vanish from the movie beyond scattered audio of them trying and failing to contact Cameron via phone calls. While this makes sense in the context of the story’s cult-schemes, it throttles the emotional core of Him before the story gets off of the ground. Throughout the rest of the film, Cameron drones on and on about how his family and friends back home is what motivates him to play football, but we only get a handful of scenes that show the audience this deeply held belief in the first ten minutes. With rare exceptions, dialogue is the only reminder to care about Cameron’s family, not his actions within the script.
This sort of stilted storytelling only gets worse in the second half when Him decides to explain itself far too neatly. If you’ve seen just about any horror movie involving cults and compounds over the last 10 years or so, you will see a solid 50% of the plot coming before the first act is even complete. One of the movie’s big mysteries is easily guessed based on the most obvious of context clues that all drop before the title card arrives, and every scene after that title card makes it even easier to decipher. While a handful of mysteries aren’t as easily guessed, that’s less because those mysteries are well-hidden and more that they’re sloppily dropped into the movie and are barely resolved by its conclusion.
The conclusion is also a deeply mixed bag. There’s a fleeting catharsis in the final sequence, but it’s undercut by the most basic of logic problems. These problems aren’t minor nitpicks either, Him manages the rare task of having what I can only describe as an “Anti-Chekhov’s Gun” in the most literal sense imaginable. An entire sequence in the second half of the movie has Cameron and Isaiah firing high-powered rifles in the desert, establishing that there are guns on the premises. It is confounding that this only comes into play for one scene afterwards and has no bearing on the final sequence of the film.
The final stretch of Him is also where the movie’s worst visuals are concentrated. A major confrontation attempts to combine horror filmmaking techniques with fight choreography, and the results are a mess. The stylish editing is so confusing that it’s hard to tell what’s going on, all while the camera needlessly shakes to indicate the intensity of the moment. To Him’s credit, this is the only bad-looking part of the movie. While Him has a laundry list of problems, it is so dazzling to look at that I was never bored. A gorgeous and terrifying visual effect used sparingly covers the frame in X-ray vision to show the internal brutality of taking tackles and getting into physical fights, horror imagery is allowed to creep into wide frame shots to build tension, and a handful of the hallucinatory sequences are skin-crawlingly visceral. If one were to grade Him’s effectiveness on how easily its most beautiful shots could be cut into a freaky music video, it would earn an A+.
There is a bitter irony in Him being so visually stunning. Generally speaking, movies should “show, don’t tell.” Him carves out a third option: Lots of spectacular imagery that doesn’t inform the audience about much of anything, and a script that has to tell you how everyone is feeling instead of the camera finding ways to show it. The end result is that Him is a pretty shell of a movie with a great Marlon Wayans performance trapped within its edges. Those two factors keep Him from being a horrible movie, and it might even keep Him from being an outright bad movie for some. That cannot be said for anyone familiar with the cult horror subgenre; For them, Him will be a bad movie at worst, and a mixed movie at best.
Him opens theatrically on Friday, September 19th, via Universal Pictures.
