by Hudson Moura
In Him (2025), director Justin Tipping and producer Jordan Peele deliver a surreal, psychologically charged descent into the brutal world of professional sports, masculine identity, and spiritual corruption. Framed as a Faustian fable with gothic flair, the film is part body horror, part sports satire, and part metaphysical psychodrama, where the pursuit of greatness is indistinguishable from self-destruction. In doing so, Him joins the ranks of a new wave of horror cinema that dares to interrogate the institutions of power—not just haunted houses or gory monsters, but the very foundations of fame, discipline, and masculinity.
The story follows Cameron Cade (Tariq Withers in a striking debut), a young quarterback raised in a Catholic, working-class family that has sacrificed everything for his athletic success. Haunted by the legacy of his father—a fallen military officer—and galvanized by the image of his childhood idol, the legendary eight-time champion Isayah (Marlon Wayans), Cameron is poised to become a star. Yet what begins as a traditional sports narrative quickly mutates into something far darker.
A grotesque injury suffered by Isayah on live television marks Cameron’s first brush with the horror of athletic mortality. Years later, after an attack by a masked figure, Cameron’s stitched head wound—eerily resembling football laces—becomes a haunting leitmotif of his transformation, evoking Cronenberg’s signature use of bodily markings as narrative symbols.
Cameron is invited into the reclusive athlete’s home—an opulent, nightmarishly surreal mansion—to train under him. What is initially presented as an honor gradually reveals itself as a ritualistic initiation. From this point, Him veers from sports drama into the territory of psychedelic Midsommar (Ari Aster) filtered through the baroque surrealism of The Holy Mountain (Alejandro Jodorowsky), with visual language steeped in the ritualistic and the absurd.
The film’s chaptered structure—“Day 1: Fun,” “Day 2: Poise,” up through “Day 6: Sacrifice”—offers a perverse counterpoint to the language of sports branding and motivational culture. These titles, plastered across the screen, parody the values of athletic training, now weaponized into rites of transformation and submission. Isayah’s house becomes a symbolic purgatory where Cameron is initiated, drugged, reprogrammed, and spiritually dismembered.
Wayans’s Isayah is both coach and cult leader, philosopher and sadist. He insists that Cameron’s greatness can only emerge through pain, loss, and the abandonment of self. His mantra, “No guts, no glory,” culminates in a darker revelation: “Greatness is the survival of the death of who you used to be.” This haunting assertion echoes Robert Redford’s Downhill Racer (1969) about an olympian skier, in which winning becomes a hollow, isolating endpoint. But Him literalizes that transformation into horror: Cameron’s body is altered through injections, his mind fractured by hallucinations, and his sense of agency eroded by manipulation disguised as mentorship. Cameron is not empowered but infected—mentally, emotionally, and even spiritually—by a legacy that is decaying from within. The injection marks the moment where ambition becomes entrapment, where the dream becomes the nightmare.
Cinematographer Kira Kelly crafts an uncanny visual space where luxury becomes claustrophobic. Isayah’s mansion is filled with mirrored surfaces, curved hallways, and an iris-shaped ceiling screen that plays looping crowd applause—evoking both surveillance and divine judgment. The goat mascot of the “Saviors” team, once a benign emblem of athletic pride, is reimagined as a demonic presence, appearing as a masked figure that haunts Cameron’s visions and convalescence.
The use of sound—whether the eerie repetition of training slogans, the echo of stadium cheers, or the silence of spiritual dislocation—intensifies the film’s dream logic. Unlike traditional sports films, Him abandons realism in favor of mythopoetic abstraction. Its horror is not the spectacle of injury but the erosion of interiority, the sacrificial rituals demanded by fame, and the transformation of competition into pathology.
What makes Him especially resonant is its critique of the neoliberal obsession with individual excellence. Cameron is told, repeatedly, that he must win for his family, for his dead father, for a legacy larger than himself. Yet this expectation is both a motivator and a trap. In a particularly disquieting moment, the team’s doctor—who functions as both enabler and executioner—asks: “Would you kill yourself for a job?” The question hangs in the air, uncomfortably familiar in a culture that conflates self-worth with productivity.
While Him builds its tension through surreal imagery and visceral physicality, its horror is not external or supernatural but internal and systemic. The dread comes from within the protagonist’s transformation—psychological, physiological, and spiritual. The focus remains squarely on the violence embedded in the culture of high-performance sports, the pressure to sacrifice identity in pursuit of greatness, and the hallucinatory unraveling of self. In that sense, the film never allows for victory to feel redemptive; instead, it renders ambition as an increasingly disfiguring experience—both emotionally and bodily.
Him is not an easy watch, nor does it strive for clarity or catharsis. It is elliptical, at times overwrought, but ultimately committed to its allegorical depth. Tipping’s direction—complemented by Jordan Peele’s influence—delivers a contemporary American nightmare dressed in cleats and championship rings.
As Gen Z and younger audiences re-evaluate the narratives of heroism and hustle passed down to them, Him arrives as a timely and necessary disruption. It is not a film about winning, but about the ghosts left behind in the locker room, in the mirror, and in the mind. 
3.5/5
In theatres September 19, 2025.