Justin Tipping’s “Him” (2025) instantly takes prime spot among the year’s absolute trainwrecks. Jordan Peele has produced this, which lures you in only to set up massive disappointment. This idiotic film seems bound by no narrative compulsion, offering neither justification for its choices nor clarity in its conceits. It’s riddled with loose ends and bizarre narrative decisions made purely for the sake of provocation—without a shred of rhyme or reason. What follows is a baffling descent into horror that escalates toward a gory climax but never once earns the outrage it so desperately courts. Its shock value feels hollow, its statements blunt and heavy-handed, wrapped in a damp passivity that seeps through every scene. The result is less purposeful than it is chaotic—a flailing mess of extreme visions and violent excess.
There are too many contrivances acting against the film, leaking out the more natural, organic pathways for the horror to emerge. It’s one thing for art to leave a tangle of twisted, unwieldy questions, quite another when the film stumbles in a maze of its own obfuscations. There’s a pointed commentary here on how white power feeds off Black suffering—how exploitation is pushed through with quiet precision. The Black body becomes the site where the cost is extracted: through endless humiliation, scapegoating, and violence. Even when the language of redemption and progress is invoked, punishment never truly ends; it only mutates, finding new ways to persist.
Him (2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
This could have been provocative and teasing, but the film doesn’t cut deep. It’s content to coast on its edgy surfaces, boldly confident the audience will chip along uncomplainingly. That’s the crucial mistake it makes as it goes on and on, lugging out loophole after loophole in a brazenly silly, unexplained mesh of high-wire narrative turns.
The film opens coyly enough. Cameron Cade has always had big dreams, buoyed by his father. Cameron (Tyriq Withers), a buzzy college quarterback player, is all set to embark on a much-touted professional career. But it’s brutally cut short when he has an accident. Or was it orchestrated? A mysterious masked figure comes and rams something into his head. There’s a brain injury, but it doesn’t stop him in his tracks. Yes, there’s some inevitable scepticism surrounding his career. He powers through, unhesitant and unflinching, proving wrong all his naysayers. But the path to his ascendancy is rife with greater threats, the shape of which will soon emerge in terrifying form.
What are the rites Isaiah puts Cam through?
He’s primed to succeed the legendary quarterback, Isaiah (Marlon Wayans). Cameron has worshipped Isaiah since his childhood, watching him in games with eagle-eyed adulation and awe. Can he ever match up to his idol? These insecurities and anguish are tapped for more outre turns in the plot, where the idol and protégé relationship becomes mired in vicious competition. In this sort of trade, one cannibalises the other. There’s space for only one. What does triumph look like when there’s such bloody compromise? Does the victor’s worth even hold up?
Anyway, Cameron makes it to Isaiah’s desert compound. On the way, there are some weird acolytes camping who almost pounce on him. They will make a return in the film, later down the road. Once he lands at the compound, his phone is seized. He can contact his family only sporadically via a shared phone booth. He is effectively cut off from the outer world.
This space becomes everything for him. He’s put through a series of rituals. Apparently, it’s all aimed to train him, prepare him better for what’s on the road. But all that’s demanded of him takes a cruel, sinister turn. He is asked to blind himself to the suffering of fellow athletes while he pursues his routine. It’s like he has to whip out any dreg of humanity in himself. His soul has to leech itself off so that he can get ahead of the curve and trample all his competitors.
The rites turn progressively ghastlier. He’s administered all sorts of blood transfusions and pills. These are meant to pump him up, get him going at horsepower. He is initially disconcerted and puzzled but complies, thinking it’s all meant for the best. Little does he know what a ride he’s being taken for, hurled into a chain of manipulations. Cameron’s personality, his own ideas on what’s happening, don’t even register. He just endures it all, accepting that this is all that the best in the biz has to go through. Along the line, there are constant demonic threats, the acolytes showing up to rough him up, but he emerges unscathed.
Him (2025) Movie Ending Explained:
Does Cam become the next GOAT?
To no one’s surprise, it’s revealed that Isaiah has been transferring his own blood to Cameron. At a later point, Isaiah stresses to Cameron that he must have his own individuality and not mould himself in the reflection of his idol. The problem with the film is that there are no emotional stakes in the film. The sense of accruing danger, the whole thing going off the rails for the protagonist, isn’t driven by thoughtful dynamics or a cogent plot that knows its intentions. It’s all directed for the pursuit of empty, hollow staging, ghoulish visitations, and strange, demented apparitions that defuse too soon, arrogated to the service of black men tussling. Of course, it’s all set to the whims of the white bosses, who push Cameron and his idol and countless others before them against each other.
At the last rite, Isaiah teases Cameron into a fight. The two clash. The former almost seems to prevail right when Cameron pushes ahead and beats him. Isaiah ends up dead in his hands. As Cam strides out into the open, he’s greeted enthusiastically by his agent, Isaiah’s widow, and the owner of the Saviors. They look like they could pass off as the Ku Klux Klan. He’s shown a contract which he must sign. He’s told his life has been designed so that he can reach this moment. In fact, the owners had made a deal with his father so that Cam could emerge as the next GOAT. So, Cameron’s own journey, his mettle in the race, takes a backseat to the plotting that has happened without his knowledge.
What makes Cam fight back?
If he doesn’t sign, his family would be imperilled. But he doesn’t cede. Rather, he goes out in a frenzied bloodbath, killing everyone on the spot and refusing to continue the lineage of black domination under white rules and structures. However, there are no triumphal notes to this close, for there’s not a shred of emotional depth. We arrive at the end with no defined idea of the protagonist, what drives him besides his father’s resolve, and what pushes him into the bloodbath. His resistance, which should have resounded more powerfully, has no power or reach. It sputters out in a weary, unconvinced anti-climactic rush, despite the body count in the denouement.
