All Guts, No Glory: Reflecting on Him One Year Later
By Avery Jay
Tyriq Withers in Him (2025)
There’s nothing quite like anticipating a movie that actually meets your expectations. That doesn’t account for when the film becomes a punching bag for a majority of audiences. Him (2025), directed by Justin Tipping, disappointed the majority. Not me. It had all the guts it needed to scrutinise America’s fetish with football. It never had the glory of recent original works like Obsession (2026) and Buddy (2026), though.
It was released in September last year right as football season was revving up, and I couldn’t help to wonder whether its box-office bombing was from angry football fans looking into the mirror. Now that the film is a year in the rearview, it’s a movie worth revisiting. Especially since a new audience discovered the film through Netflix and placed it among the top-ten list on the platform. Death to streamers, but they do help discoverability in a time when theatre screening windows are shorter than ever.
Him introduces Cameron “Cam” Cade (played by Tyriq Withers) as a young boy in front of his television set with his dad chanting in the background for the Saviors playing on screen. It happens to be the moment in which the superstar footballer Isaiah White (played by Marlon Wayans) is injured Kevin Ware-style on live television. Cam tries to protect his innocence by turning away from the gore, but his father forces his attention back on the screen in the name of “being a man”. Years later, and after his father’s death, Cam is on the road to greatness via the football combine. Could this twenty-something be White’s replacement?
Cameron’s future in football is jeopardized in the wake of a mysterious head injury. Isaiah White gives him a second chance with an invitation to his compound in the Texas desert. It’s a rigorous program with one-on-one training from the G.O.A.T. himself. But alarms sound at every corner. Isaiah’s behavior is constantly shifting from earnest to eerie. The recruits he’s enlisted for football practice are too eager to be battered in the name of the Saviors. Why does the medical assistant on site keep injecting mysterious vials into Cameron’s bloodstream? This is everything Cam has worked for. So, how could he stop short of the finish line?
Written in collaboration between Justin Tipping, Skip Bronkie, and Zack Akers, this is a transfigured coming-of-age story about a footballer within the confines of the horror genre. That is what trips the critics most of all. Horror has become an increasingly expansive genre over the last decade in light of “elevated” horror and narratives that exploit dread more than fear. So, Him fails to provide a good scare to general audiences. Yet what it explores is still sinister and very real.
In broader strokes is what the film has to say about the relationship between violence and sports entertainment. Marco, resident health practitioner played by Jim Jefferies, draws the uncanny similarities between ancient Rome and American football. If that’s all this film intended to commentate on, then anyone could have played the roles of Isaiah White and Cameron Cade. The reality is that football, as we know it, is built on the backs of Black and brown men. America’s exploitation of Black bodies expanded outside of slave labor and into entertainment around the 18th century with Mandingo fights and continued through the development of sports. I’m not one for sports history but know that Black players were accepted when they could be easy collateral and discarded when it came time to cough up a check.
Football was founded on American traditionalism which includes the Christian faith. Despite there being heavy opposition to the violent sport in its early days, it now draws more spectators than a Sunday service. As some sports fans, and haters, would say, football is the new religion. Maybe that’s why critics said that Him was too “on-the-nose” with its religious imagery and parallels. When Isaiah puts his own spin on the popular idiom “God, family, football”, it exposes what he deems most important. Not God or even family, but football. And this happens after he kills his biggest fan who sacrificed her life right in front of her two sons: in the name of Football. Most importantly, though, in the name of Him.
Young athletes are prophesied and idolized before their frontal lobe can even develop, and we see the ramifications of this in White’s character. Both him and Cade are looking in a two-way mirror. White sees his younger self at the threshold of the answer to all his troubles and Cade sees his older self coming apart at the seams from decades of control and pressure. Tyriq Withers and Marlon Wayans definitely heightened the tone of this film with their shared chemistry and respective portrayals. But their characters, on page, exist in a capitalistic, man-eats-man world where misogyny isn’t just a woman’s problem.
This was one of those movies that some viewers claimed drew up too many thematic elements without ever stitching them together. It’s the first sports horror of its kind, though. Combining the hot topic of body horror post-The Substance with Americana, it leaves a lot to unpack and with layers of nuance. What the marketing did pre-release ultimately scrambled expectations. Horror fans were certainly excited for this, but they were under the impression that it was a Jordan Peele movie.
Julia Fox and Tyriq Withers in Him (2025)
It’s a tale as old as time at this point. Trailers give too much away and they’re not always angled in service of the narrative itself. I can’t help but to think of Companion (2024). Similarly, the marketing for Him was tethered to the notoriety of Jordan Peele: executive producer of the film. Him being Tipping’s directorial debut meant that the studio needed to land the right pitch in order to maximize their audience. They emphasized this as a Peele production leading the public to believe this was his movie rather than Justin Tipping. So, of course viewers were confused when the visual style and direction of Him was wholly different from what we’ve seen of Peele.
Even a year later and I still can’t really wrap my head around the hate for Him. With great performances, ruthless brutality, and unique commentary, this was one of my favorite watches of last year. I’ve never been one for football. Consider me a fake American. So, this felt like the antithesis to the sports genre that I never knew I needed. Move over Remember The Titans: a new QB has entered the field.
Avery Jay (she/they) is girlblog’s Film & TV Editor. She copes with the horrors of the world through her love for horror in the media.
They're a journalist hunting down the best queer horror, a scholar tracking the history of Black horror, and a community organizer bringing diverse genre fans together in NYC and beyond. There's no such thing as a "bad movie" where Avery's concerned.
Her work has been published across entertainment publications: in print and online. They're the Horror Oracle: divining horror's mystique.