Jonah Naplan   September 19, 2025

A surrealistic horror movie about football might seem like a good idea on paper, but “Him,” the latest film from director Justin Tipping and producer Jordan Peele struggles to score a touchdown. It’s the kind of bizarre project that would never have seen the light of day if not for a big name like Peele backing it, and the script by Tipping, Skip Bronkie, and Zack Akers is so consistently disjointed that you can never identify what exactly it wants to say. There’s certainly an underlying message here about toxic masculinity and how the professional football draft could be compared to a modern-day slave auction, but the film’s wooden approach never prompts such meaningful conversations. Worth discussing, however, is the film’s sports-inflected answer to Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” with all its strange cut-aways and utterly surreal asides which feel like pretentious “artistic” mini-movies instead of a part of the larger story. Peele has made so many wonderful contributions to the horror genre over the last decade, but “Him” sure isn’t one of them.

The film follows rising football star Cameron “Cam” Cade (Tyriq Withers), an intense lover of the sport from a very young age. His aspirations for greatness were largely influenced by his father (Don Benjamin), with whom Cam shares an affinity for Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), the legendary Saviors quarterback. As White is heading for retirement, he invites the up-and-coming Cam, who has just recently suffered a near career-ending injury, to train with him in his remote desert bunker. But, of course, all is not as it seems, as the former football player’s methods become increasingly wicked and dangerous, and the walls of the compound begin to close in, trapping Cam in a suffocating snare. It’s one of those locations where we know something is off because of the odd behaviors of the clientele, but we’re not sure what that “something” is until it gets revealed at the end. Or, in the case of “Him,” it doesn’t.

I’m not sure I’ve seen another movie this year as thematically bizarre and narratively incompetent as this one. There’s so many strange, or otherwise irreverent, sequences in “Him” that will stand out as some of the most unintentionally hilarious of 2025. Tipping’s use of metaphors and biblical allusions is ridiculous from the very beginning, and only becomes more insufferable as the film progresses. “Him” features, among other things, a recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Old Testament punishment machines, a tribunal, and enough ordinary-objects-turned-killing-devices that the movie could have gotten away with being titled “Weapons.”

If this all seems like it wouldn’t have anything to do with football, you’d be right. Everyone involved, from the director, to the actors, to editor Taylor Mason, knows this, too, and yet they never manage to turn “Him” into anything thematically rich, let alone a movie that knows what it wants us to make of all this visual nonsense. It’s important to note that “Him” was made in partnership with Peele’s studio Monkeypaw Productions, a company famous for depicting Black perspectives in genre films like “Get Out, “Us,” “Nope,” and “Candyman,” and while “Him” holds similar features and themes, including two African-American leads, core messages about toxic masculinity, and, of course, elements of horror ranging from jumpscares to sudden bursts of violence, Tipping never takes these pieces in a meaningful direction, and the result is something near-incomprehensible that falls short of making a big statement about the smothering reality of athletic fame, the conveyor belt nature of football drafting, or the suppression of Black voices.

The performances cover the whole spectrum of credibility. Withers, who was just in that bad remake of “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” barely leaves any impression as Cam, a character the script never defines as anything more than a hotshot with a resting sad face. His big “paint the town red” moment at the end fails at being dynamic because his characterizations throughout the rest of the movie are so flat. Wayans is, perhaps surprisingly, the movie’s stand-out, embodying a character who’s completely ambiguous in his motivations but utterly beguiling in a handful of strong sequences, including one where footballs cause severe physical as well as mental pain. All of the side characters make little impact, including White’s preppy wife Elsie (Julia Fox) and Cam’s professional manager Tom (Tim Heidecker).

The psychological mind trip that “Him” wants to be never fully comes out because the filmmakers rush through its one-note finale and often have us confused rather than unsettled. Tipping’s “savior mentality” feels muddled and forced not just because of how much he has the characters preach about it but because the movie quite literally reckons with imagery of prophets and deities. Even the tongue-and-cheek title, “Him,” would suggest the presence of a God. A singular saving grace might be the cinematography by Kira Kelly, whose work is something of a revelation and makes this incoherent mess at least cool to look at. Her use of negative space to illustrate the hollowness of White’s compound is intriguing, and the visual compositions of colorful costumes in an otherwise blank desert setting are equally astonishing. It all just adds to the feeling that “Him” is an unsubtle film with the professionalism to think it’s classy.

Now playing in theaters.