Him

Beware of all men who are obsessed with the pursuit of a purpose! That purpose, quite easily, may be their only interest in you.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Him presents itself as a hybrid experiment: psychological horror, mystical symbolism, sport as the arena of will, and a tale of ambition that risks becoming obsession. From the outset, the film raises a provocative moral question: what is the price of greatness when identity itself becomes currency?

Cam embodies the dream of self-realization through discipline: every fiber of his being is oriented toward results, toward recognition. But training with Isaiah gradually reveals that the sacrifice demanded is not only physical: it is the offering up of identity itself. The film asks whether greatness can be bought at the cost of surrendering parts of oneself — passions, relationships, mental health — and whether this offering does not amount to a form of self-alienation.

Cade’s story can be read as a contemporary echo of epic cinema: it is no coincidence that his path recalls the arc of Maximus in Gladiator. Here too we find a man thrown into the arena, forced to fight not only against visible adversaries but against a destiny that turns him into a spectacle for the crowd. If in ancient Rome gladiators were slaves of imperial violence, today’s football champions — though rich and famous — are no less prisoners: slaves to contracts, to performance, to fleeting approval. Stadium lights replace the Colosseum, yet the dynamic remains the same: bodies offered up as sacrifice to satisfy the collective hunger for violence and glory.

Isaiah appears as a messianic figure who exerts power over Cam not so much through what he does, but through the myth he embodies. The isolated space becomes a site of spiritual and mental manipulation: what at first seems like mentorship turns into a dark abyss, where it is no longer clear who is leading whom. There is an echo of the cult paradigm, of secular religions of sport, where sacrifice is exalted and the individual must adhere to rituals that go beyond reason.

The film often plays with the boundary between aspiration and self-destruction. To aspire (WHO DARES WINS, as Cam’s father used to say) means to push one’s limits, but Him suggests that surpassing the limit can lead to a fall: when the vision of success tears at the psyche, when the ecstasy of recognition dissolves into the vertigo of losing oneself. Supernatural elements amplify this condition, with inner visions and symbols that destabilize the distinction between reality and delusion.

Woven into the background is the theme of doping, never confronted head-on but constantly evoked: transfusions, pills, potions, supplements become sacraments of a new religion of the body. Training with Isaiah resembles an initiation ritual that, in its logic, differs little from doping practices that turn the athlete into a machine. Here sacrifice is not only symbolic: it is biochemical, the deep alteration of flesh to feed the myth.

The crowd, with its exaltations and ferocious judgments, is portrayed as a headless organism: fans and haters appear as zombies, indistinct masses who consume and judge without ever truly understanding. Cade and Isaiah live under the gaze of these social undead, prisoners of likes and insults, nourishing themselves while at the same time being consumed within the same cannibalistic spectacle.

In American sports rhetoric, the slogan “God, family, football” represents a sacred triad of values. In Him, Isaiah overturns it: Football, family, God. The homeland no longer appears, and religious transcendence slips to the bottom of the list, relegated almost to a folkloric residue. The absolute center is football, elevated to a unique and insatiable deity. Isaiah’s house, aesthetically sublime, with artworks instead of furniture, both sumptuous and unsettling, resembles a contemporary art museum: a mausoleum where objects become instruments of power and self-celebration, a sign that his religion admits no other worship than that of the ego.

Despite some excess of aestheticism — pleasing to the eye nonetheless — Him compels viewers to ask how much of their own life they have spent (or are willing to spend) for what others perceive as greatness. How much of one’s humanity can be lost — innocence, balance, pseudo-freedom — in the name of success? Cam becomes the lens through which we observe the paradox: the desire to rise can be as vital as it is destructive.

Him is a work that aspires to be critical, dark, evocative, and at times it succeeds. It dares to merge sport, horror, and spiritual symbolism, though it pays the price of uneven execution while still managing to sustain the weight of its ambition. It is a meditation on the system — sporting and beyond — on devotion as a possible trap, and on the sense of possibility that can be sacrificed on the altar of glory.

A film that wears a mask — the pop, mainstream one — only to reveal itself as something else…

The ending seals its nature: the slogan is overturned, no longer “who dares wins,” but “who knows wins.”
 It is a revealing shift, moving the focus from athletic gesture to knowledge, from pure strength to critical awareness. Thus the work, under the guise of a horror made of sculpted bodies, violence, blood, art, and beauty, reveals itself as a symbolic autopsy of an entire system — sporting, social, existential — caught in its phase of decomposition. There, in disintegration, an undeniable truth emerges: only those who know, who see with clarity and without illusions, can call themselves victorious — at least with respect to themselves.

To conquer oneself is the first and noblest of all victories; to be defeated by one’s own nature is the worst and most ignoble of defeats.
Plato