Who do you think you are? I am
I’ll never fully understand why some stylish, vibes-only movies capture the movie-geek zeitgeist while others get dumped at the curb. Him is undoubtedly the latter: it earned an abysmal 30% on Rotten Tomatoes in an era when simply showing up with 90 minutes of footage with camera pointing the right direction will get you that number. It tanked at the box office. Saturation is certainly part of the problem: Him sits squarely in the same satirical sandbox as Opus, The Menu, and a handful of other slick thrillers where our deified celebrities push normal members of society to outrageous, bloody extremes. When the market’s full of spiky black comedies about worship and consumption, it requires something particularly sharp to draw blood.
So when I come to the slight defense of Him, understand the parameters. I don’t really think this is a good movie, exactly. It lacks a story of any sort and never lands on anything close to a coherent thesis. Those are not small potholes. But it does have buckets of style where many peers are content to “do an A24,” slap on a droning synth, and call it a day.
The film doesn’t help itself by having shockingly little of substance to say about football or being an athlete. Cameron “Cam” Cade (Tyriq Withers) wants the dream; Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) is the retiring legend dangling it in front of him; the plot sets them up as frenemy rival-partners through a nonsense conflict about Cam filling White’s roster spot if he passes White’s tests. Nothing here actually feels like a sport; more like an Wagnerian struggle for Cam’s soul. And yet it loves the high drama and linguistic cadence of sport and its culture: The script wields the title of “G.O.A.T.” upon its characters in truly idiotic terms, like Cam and White are running for mayor against each other. For a movie allegedly about the identity and cultural role of the football player, Him keeps football mostly offscreen, swapping the nuts and bolts of the sport for a cult pageant about greatness.
And yet, it carves out a bizarre and distinct voice. Him is athlete culture cranked so high it becomes hysterical parody, yet performed with a straight face. Jordan Peele’s name is plastered everywhere (he produces), and the marketing all but begs you to treat this as a stealth Peele joint. And I actually see something in that: The comic DNA aligns with Peele’s Comedy Central days deconstructing Black identity, macho performance, and the ridiculous showmanship of sports culture (see: the names in “East/West College Bowl”). I laughed a lot: Wayans intones “football, family, God” under spaceship lighting while Elsie White (Julia Fox) twerks on the floor. That’s either self-evidently hilarious or self-evidently awful, and I cannot properly make the distinction.
The movie is also drenched in Jesus iconography: crosses, crowns, rituals, processions, blood resembling stigmata. This is ostensibly critiquing the way we uncritically canonize our cultural icons in the modern media landscape. Mostly it reads as an excuse to frame Withers and Wayans in painterly tableaux, Christ-adjacent but mood-lit, with satanic images and violence sprinkled like glitter. The depiction of hyper-masculinity doesn’t register as a moral stance so much as pushing the exaltation of bodies and brands past breaking point, with an appropriate amount of steroid and drug use shown, too.
Tipping arranges everything like a hyper-violent parody of the commercials you see in any NFL broadcast: those hagiographic mini–art films courtesy of Gatorade and Nike and Adidas. Kira Kelly’s cinematography favors neon-bathed shrines and crystalline sweat beads; Taylor Joy Mason’s cutting has all sorts of fast and slow rhythms in it, which is pleasing but shapeless. Shots rely heavily on slow-mo and aggressive coloring. The images are sometimes stunning, but they’re not especially memorable, which I think is because they’re not really arranged into any sort of statement. They just sit in a line instead of developing into anything human. Compare it to The Substance: on the surface, both interrogate the appeal and power of youthful perfection, but where Coralie Fargeat escalates with vicious control, Him drifts. It’s an airy, aimless film that never builds.
Withers does his best to hold a non-character together, and he does sell the awe and the nausea of being subsumed into the “big leagues,” but I never buy him as a person. Wayans plays against type, except it doesn’t feel “against type”: he’s so effortlessly a sermonizing tyrant you forget he’s an ex-comedian. Julia Fox plays Julia Fox. Tim Heidecker, the legendary absurdist comedian, is the best performance here as the oily agent Tom, a perfect vector for the movie’s funniest nastiness. My favorite gag is the face-to-football gauntlet—absurd, upsetting, and exactly the film’s wavelength. My least favorite scene, whatever it is, has already evaporated from neurons: Him is the kind of movie whose success is in linear proportion with how much it can jolt you into astonishment or outrage at any given moment.
At no point while watching Him did I think I was watching a functional piece of cinema, so I don’t think I can give it a pass. And still, I feel weirdly fond of the film. Maybe movies like Him and Poolman, which make my heart glow even when I feel intellectually dishonest actually recommending them, actually are good movies. Maybe “good” isn’t a useful unit of measurement for art worth engaging with. Maybe I shouldn’t have tethered this review site’s whole brand to a quasi-ironic rating system that reduces creative output into a number and that I came up with five minutes before recording a podcast episode. Maybe you shouldn’t listen to me, or to any critic, and should form your own opinions. Maybe we live in such noisy, depressing times that movies are just more stimulation for our polluted brains. Maybe the fact that I’m crashing out with no punchline in sight means I need to end this review and go for a walk. Go see Him. Or don’t.
Is It Good?
Nearly Good (4/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.
2 replies on “Him (2025)”
“I’ll never fully understand why some stylish, vibes-only movies capture the movie-geek zeitgeist while others get dumped at the curb”
A Nightmare On Elm Street 4, man.
Gotta catch this when it hits streaming, it fits way too many of my narratives to ignore. The only annoyance is the possible requirement of having to half-assedly research football to understand why it’s wrong, though I *think* I’m already pretty sure quarterbacks don’t, uh, anoint their own replacements like Roman emperors.
I’d def be interested to hear your take on Him. It’s got “film as ornamentation” potential even if I’m still not quite sure what that means.
I’ll binge the Nightmares at some point for sure now that I’ve seen the Halloweens and most of the Fridays. Of course, I can’t complete the Fridays until I see the Nightmares. Hoping to enjoy that one as much as you.
I was sports editor and columnist at my college newspaper though have diminished significantly in my fandom in recent years, but I was at least well equipped on that front. A rule of thumb is that you can ask yourself “does this scene replicate or represent anything about professional football?” and then you can answer yourself “no.”