American football isn’t just a sport to Him; it’s a ritual that consumes bodies, consecrates celebrity and creates prophets of the true believers. Produced by Jordan Peele and directed by Justin Tipping, this unnerving thriller turns the gridiron into a haunted chapel, where ambition and adulation threaten to become madness. The result is daring and often gripping — until a final stretch that swaps eerie logic for sloppy mayhem.
A producer’s stamp and a director’s unsettling vision
Peele’s imprimatur suggests a high-concept horror playbook rooted in social critique, and Tipping — whose TV credits include The Chi and Dear White People as well as the feature Kicks — drives the ball with an approach that steers more giallo than straight sports drama. The NFL has its legal reasons for not allowing trademarks to appear in the film, but that restriction unleashes iconographic hallucinations into something as mythic and macabre as it is familiar.
- A producer’s stamp and a director’s unsettling vision
- Wayans and Withers run with the ball in taut, bruising roles
- Gridiron iconography, weaponized into ritualized dread
- Julia Fox steals scenes — and sharpens the film’s point
- A third-act fumble that undercuts eerie momentum
- Verdict: A bold and bloody curio with lingering questions
With Tipping and fellow writers Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie, they targeted how the sport creates legends and rationalizes damage. The league is not the point; it’s the apparatus — training, branding, hero worship — that renders “the next big thing” as something of a sacrificial offering.
Wayans and Withers run with the ball in taut, bruising roles
Marlon Wayans, it turns out, is good at showing gravity: He plays Isaiah White, a veteran quarterback whose body and soul bear the weight of prolonged punishment. A striking counterpoint is offered by Tyriq Withers as Cameron Cade, a wide-eyed draft prospect desperate for greatness. Isaiah enrolls Cam in a classified desert compound that operates as a hush-hush torture chamber, stripping away everyday lifelines (phone, friends, routine) in favor of the rigors of monastic discipline and obedience tests.
Their dynamic crackles: mentor and protégé dissolve into rivals, father figure and heir into devourer and sacrifice. It’s the glassy resolve on Withers’ wide-eyed face, his body tensed like a spring in repose, that provides edgy flutters to the film even when the plotting wobbles underfoot.
Gridiron iconography, weaponized into ritualized dread
It’s when Him warps the game’s pageantry that it feels most alive. Mascots become slasher apparitions — enlarged smiles crossing over menace. Fans transform into zealots with painted faces and frothy eyes, their chants curdled to a dirge. Locker-room medicine is transformed into ritual, immersed in pounding soundscapes and blood-red lighting. One late scene in an infernal steam room is a particular standout for pure, suffocating dread.
Religious imagery stitches the film — crosses, communion, a garish Last Supper tableau — yoking football’s language of sacrifice to cult devotion. It’s a bold, uneasy mirror. Real-life data ratchets up the subtext: The CDC reports millions of sports concussions take place each year in the U.S., and BU’s CTE Center has found a disturbing percentage of CTE among brains donated by retired pro football players. Tipping doesn’t preach, but his repertoire of X-ray filters and strobe effects implies a body that is always being scanned, probed, spent.
Julia Fox steals scenes — and sharpens the film’s point
Enter Julia Fox as Elsie, Isaiah’s influencer wife — a luminescent messenger of wealth and white privilege in a fortress made from Black labor. She swans through rooms in disco-ball couture, speaks the language of “wellness,” and considers secrecy a lifestyle brand. The satire is bald, but Fox’s comic rhythms also lend extra edge to the movie’s argument about who benefits from the spectacle and who suffers for it.
A third-act fumble that undercuts eerie momentum
Over two acts, Tipping toggles cleverly between subjective horror and plausible conspiracy: Are Cam’s nightmare visions the fallout of head trauma, infection by fame, or really, truly the occult beneath the team’s glossy exterior?
The payoff, however, abruptly changes lanes into a daylight slugfest with the thin line of antagonists roughly drawn. The staging is too conventional after so much delicate dread, and a number of threads — characters, teases, maybe even an offscreen killing — feel stranded.
It’s not so much that the ending isn’t gruesome; it’s just that it’s blunt where the film had been insinuating. The movie toward the end begins to suggest some great thesis about masculinity, faith and the commodification of pain — only to settle for a crowd-pleasing splatter rather than a psychologically coherent crescendo.
Verdict: A bold and bloody curio with lingering questions
Him is most effective as filmic challenge: the locker room as sanctum, the highlight reel as altar, the athlete brought to sacrifice. Wayans and Withers provide it with emotional heft, and Tipping has an eye for nightmare pageantry. This is a clunky final drive, again, but it’s one that will make you start thinking about the growing canon of sports horror beyond the end zone — and asking what kind of god requires these touchdowns.
Sports medicine authorities, from the American Academy of Neurology to the National Athletic Trainers’ Association, have long cautioned that repetitive head impacts shift the calculus of “no pain, no gain.” Him takes that caution and turns it into a cracked mirror: Look too closely and you might see the game you love grinning back at you wearing a mask.
