HIM

HIM 2025 Review: Is Marlon Wayans’ Horror Film Worth It?

HIM 2025 Review: Messy, Bold, and More Watchable Than the Critics Want You to Believe

The HIM 2025 review verdict: this psychological horror film drops Marlon Wayans into something that functions as its own kind of mirror. Justin Tipping’s psychological horror film dropped in September 2025 to a critical consensus so negative it almost functions as its own kind of marketing. Critics called it hollow, brain-dead, and incomprehensibly bad. Audiences who actually watched it found something more complicated — a flawed, ambitious film with a genuinely great lead performance, striking visuals, and a story that stays on track long enough to deliver an ending. It is not a great movie. It is an interesting one. And in a landscape full of safe, forgettable films, interesting counts for something.

What Is HIM?

HIM centers on a promising young football player, Cameron Cade, invited to train at the isolated compound of a dynasty team’s aging quarterback. The legendary quarterback Isaiah White takes his protégé on a blood-chilling journey into the inner sanctum of fame, power, and the pursuit of excellence at any cost. The film was produced by Jordan Peele’s Productions and distributed by Universal Pictures. It stars Marlon Wayans as Isaiah White and newcomer Tyriq Withers as Cam, with Julia Fox as Isaiah’s celebrity wife.

The premise is strong on paper — a Monkeypaw Productions sports cult chiller about the physical and spiritual costs of the game — and the first two acts deliver enough tension and character work to justify the concept. Think Whiplash filtered through the visual language of Get Out, set in the world of professional football.

The Experience

HIM is not a football movie. Getting that expectation right before you press play makes the whole experience better. This is a psychological horror film featuring a couple of football players, with plenty of commentary on fame and the quest for greatness. The sport is a setting and a symbol, not the subject.

What the film does well in its first two acts is build a genuinely unsettling dynamic between Cam and Isaiah. The ambition here is impossible to ignore — Justin Tipping is not interested in playing it safe, and the film leans into visual storytelling over conventional narrative in ways that are very daring. The cinematography is striking throughout. The compound feels genuinely claustrophobic and wrong. The infrared x-ray sequences during violent moments are an inventive visual choice that gives those scenes a different texture from anything else in the genre this year.

The character evolution is one of the film’s strongest elements. Both Cam and Isaiah reveal themselves gradually — you see who they actually are beneath the surface layer by layer, and by the time the third act arrives, the people on screen are not quite the people who started the film. That arc is earned, even if the execution around it is uneven.

What Works

Marlon Wayans carries the film. Wayans delivers a performance that is magnetic and terrifying at the same time — Isaiah is a superstar quarterback, and there is something in his performance that makes you forget about anything else happening on screen.This is a dramatic role most audiences would not have expected from him, and he handles it with enough shark-eyed intensity to anchor the entire film around himself. Every scene he is in works.

Tyriq Withers holds his own opposite Wayans, which is no small thing for a newcomer. The physical performance alone — the training sequences are brutal and convincing — establishes him as someone worth watching in future projects.

The visuals are the best part of the movie. Some scenes are warped, almost hallucinatory, and combined with Bobby Krlic’s score, they create an unpredictable atmosphere. The cinematography amplifies the sense that Cam is entering a world both familiar and completely alien. The film sounds as good as it looks — the score is a genuine asset.

What Doesn’t

The third act is where HIM loses the thread. Cool ideas don’t always coalesce into a powerful narrative, and while HIM charges full force with visual aplomb and bold symbolism, it ultimately falls short despite its intriguing social commentary. The film tries to say too many things simultaneously — about Black masculinity, athletic exploitation, the cult of sports celebrity, faith, and power — and the result is a pile of partially explored ideas rather than a cohesive argument.

The film rarely stops to explore its themes in much depth, ending up more like a series of striking observations than an argument. The symbolism, which includes a Last Supper tableau and repeated religious imagery, is heavy-handed enough to pull viewers out of the tension rather than deepen it. The finale goes big but lands messy.

Julia Fox is underused. She clearly understands the film better than the script allows her to demonstrate, and the scenes she does have suggest a sharper version of HIM exists somewhere in the edit.

Verdict

HIM is a film that critics wrote off too quickly and audiences who went in expecting a straightforward sports movie also misjudged. Approach it as a psychological horror film about the cost of greatness — with a career-best dramatic performance from Marlon Wayans and visuals that genuinely earn their ambition — and there is a watchable, occasionally gripping movie here.

It is messy. The third act fumbles what the first two built. The themes never quite cohere into the statement the film is reaching for. But the cast is good, the story stays on track long enough to deliver an ending, and there are sequences in this film that stick with you. For a movie critics called incomprehensibly bad, that is more than it was given credit for.

Stream it. Go in without expectations. Let Marlon Wayans do his thing.