The Hype, the Horror, the Hail Mary
When Him was announced, it sounded electrifying: a supernatural sports thriller about masculinity, faith, and obsession.
The logline promised something between Friday Night Lights and Hereditary, with football as religion and mentorship as possession. It was marketed as a genre experiment. finally, something weird, something new.
But from the opening scene, you sense the disconnect. The tone can’t decide what movie it wants to be: a psychological horror, a biblical allegory, or an ESPN fever dream.
It’s not that the film is bad because it’s ambitious. it’s bad because it mistakes confusion for complexity.
The Cult of Masculinity, Exorcised (Badly)
Still, buried in the chaos is a fascinating idea. Him wants to explore the American fixation on men who destroy themselves for glory, whether they are athletes, soldiers, CEOs, and the systems that cheer them on.
The film’s best moments are almost grotesque: players baptizing themselves in sweat and blood, confessing sins through violence, praying for relevance as their bodies collapse. It could have been brilliant. But the movie doesn’t know what to do with its own insight.
Instead of unraveling toxic masculinity, it just fetishizes it.
The camera lingers on broken bodies, but not on the cost. The message drowns in spectacle.
What might have been a sermon on sacrifice turns into a Super Bowl halftime hallucination.
When Symbolism Eats the Script
Every frame of Him looks like it means something. Every shot feels symbolic, heavy, and intentional, but the film never cashes in on those moments.
There’s biblical imagery, occult references, tech horror, and sports mythology, and not a single cohesive sentence between them.
The director reportedly said there were “hundreds of edits” for the final scene. You can feel it. It’s a film edited by anxiety.
The result is cinematic noise. Beautiful, ambitious noise that occasionally hits the right note but never becomes a melody.
Marlon Wayans, the Last Man Standing
And then there’s Marlon Wayans. His performance serves as a strange anchor in an otherwise unmoored film. He’s doing five movies at once, but at least he’s doing something. Wayans later defended the film, saying, “Some movies are ahead of the curve.”
That’s a generous take. More accurately, Him is ahead of its own coherence.
But there’s a kernel of truth in his comment. the movie might not be watchable, but it’s undeniably trying.
And that’s rare.
Ambition Isn’t the Enemy - Confusion Is
We live in a cinematic era terrified of risk. Studios play it safe, algorithms decide the endings, and anything strange gets buried under superhero sequels. So when a film like Him appears, part of you wants to root for it, even when it’s collapsing.
You can see the DNA of better films inside it: Whiplash’s obsession, Mother!’s chaos, Nope’s grandeur. But it’s as if the film swallowed its influences whole and never learned to digest them.
The ambition is admirable. The execution is chaos.
And sometimes, chaos is fascinating, just not for the reasons the creators intended.
Why should I care
Even as the internet tears Him apart, the movie lingers.
Not because it’s good, but because it represents something that most modern movies have lost: audacity.
It’s easy to mock an ambitious failure. It’s harder to make one.
And that’s the paradox of Him: it’s both a disaster and a reminder that cinema still has room to swing wildly, miss spectacularly, and leave a mark anyway.
In the end, Him doesn’t redefine horror, sports, or masculinity. But it does redefine the art of falling flat with purpose.
Perhaps the real horror isn’t the demon on the field, but what happens when our creative risks are replaced with safe mediocrity.
At least Him tried to score.
