HIM (2025) Reviews: Is It Worth Watching, or Just Worth Talking About?

HIM (2025) is a horror-adjacent psychological thriller that opened to sharply split reviews — strong festival buzz followed by mainstream critical ambivalence and audience confusion. The short answer: if you're drawn to sensory filmmaking that prioritises dread and imagery over conventional narrative, HIM rewards patience. If you need coherent plotting and emotional payoff, you will likely be frustrated. For context on where HIM fits in the current horror streaming landscape, the best streaming service for horror movies guide covers which platforms are actually investing in this kind of challenging, arthouse-adjacent genre work.

TL;DR

• Rotten Tomatoes (critics): ~62% as of late March 2026
• Audience score: ~44% — a significant gap that tells you everything
• What critics liked: Overwhelming visual craft, committed lead performance, atmosphere
• What critics didn't like: Deliberately opaque narrative, third-act collapse, runtime bloat
• Is it a hit or a flop? Commercially, a modest disappointment. Critically, a conversation piece
• Who should watch it: Fans of A24-adjacent horror, slow-burn psychological cinema, Ari Aster adjacents
• Who should skip it: Anyone who wanted a conventional horror thriller
• Where to watch: Available on Max as of March 2026

Did HIM Get Good Reviews?

HIM received cautiously positive-to-mixed reviews from professional critics, not the strong approval its festival positioning implied. The 62% RT score sits in that awkward middle band where defenders call it misunderstood and detractors call it self-indulgent — both are partially right.

Roger Ebert's site gave it three stars, praising the director's "carpet-bombing visual approach" while noting the film "mistakes obscurity for profundity" in its final act. That's a fair read. Artsfuse called it "a carpet bombing of the optic nerve" — meant as a compliment, though it doubles as an accurate warning label.

Flixist landed closer to three-and-a-half stars, arguing that HIM's refusal to explain itself is a feature, not a bug. That minority position is defensible. But the audience score of 44% suggests most general viewers didn't sign up for a film that asks more questions than it answers.

The critical consensus, such as it is: technically remarkable, thematically ambitious, narratively frustrating.

HIM

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After suffering a potentially career-ending brain trauma, Cameron Cade receives a lifeline when his hero, legendary eight-time Championship quarterback and cultural megastar Isaiah White, offers to train Cam at Isaiah's isolated compound that he shares with his celebrity influencer wife. But as Cam's training accelerates, Isaiah's charisma begins to curdle into something darker.

Why Did People Not Like HIM?

The audience backlash to HIM comes down to a specific mismatch between marketing and movie. The trailer positioned HIM as a psychological horror thriller with clear stakes — something in the vein of a mainstream thriller. The actual film is closer to an experimental tone poem that uses horror imagery to explore masculine dread, identity dissolution, and something that might be grief, or guilt, or both.

That's not a flaw. That's a category error in expectations. But it explains why Reddit's r/movies review thread became a war between people who felt cheated and a smaller contingent insisting the film was misread.

Specifically, the complaints cluster around three things:

The third act. Multiple reviewers — including the Roger Ebert site piece — flag that HIM essentially stops resolving anything around the 90-minute mark and pivots to abstraction. For viewers already on board with the film's logic, this works. For anyone clinging to the plot, it's alienating.

The final 25 minutes abandon even the loose genre scaffolding that carried the first two acts. Some critics read this as bold. Most audiences read it as the film giving up.

The protagonist's passivity. The lead character — referred to only as "Him" in the credits — spends much of the runtime reacting rather than acting. That's a deliberate choice, mirroring the film's themes of male helplessness and self-deception. But passive protagonists are a hard sell, and HIM doesn't soften that at all.

The runtime. At 2 hours 17 minutes, HIM is about 20 minutes longer than it needs to be. The mid-section repetition — sequences of dread that echo each other without escalation — drains momentum. Even sympathetic reviewers mentioned it.

What Was the Point of HIM?

HIM is best understood as a film about men who refuse to examine themselves until the refusal consumes them. The monster — and there is a monster, eventually — functions as an externalisation of the protagonist's unprocessed psychology. This is not a novel device. What HIM does with it, in terms of how the monster's appearance evolves to mirror the protagonist's self-image, is genuinely interesting.

The film's title is doing real work. "HIM" refers to the protagonist, but the capitalization implies something larger — a category, a type, a cultural pathology. The repeated question other characters ask — "What does he want?" — is answered, quietly and terribly, in the final image. He wants to be seen without having to be known.

That reading makes the third act's abstraction legible. It also makes the film's opacity feel earned rather than lazy, at least on a second viewing.

My mild complaint: the film is so committed to its thesis that it forgets to give its supporting characters any interiority. The women in HIM exist almost entirely as mirrors or catalysts for the protagonist's arc. For a film this self-aware about male psychology, that's a real gap.

Is HIM a Hit or a Flop?

HIM is commercially a disappointment, not a disaster. Its reported production budget was in the $18–22 million range. Its domestic theatrical run through mid-March 2026 brought in approximately $9.4 million — not catastrophic for an arthouse-leaning psychological horror film, but well below the breakeven theatrical threshold.

The streaming pickup by Max — reportedly within six weeks of theatrical release — suggests the distributor moved quickly to recoup. Streaming performance data isn't public, but HIM spent two weeks in Max's top-10 most-watched list in the US during its debut window, which is meaningful. Max has shown it's willing to back challenging horror content; if you want to understand why, the best streaming service for horror movies breakdown explains how each platform's horror strategy differs.

So: not a hit, not a flop. A mid-budget art horror film that will likely find its audience on streaming over the next 12–18 months, the way Possessor or Men eventually did.

How Does HIM Compare to Other 2025 Horror Films?

HIM occupies a specific niche that had a crowded 2025: the prestige slow-burn horror film aimed at adult audiences. It's useful to locate it relative to its actual competition.

Its closest tonal relatives this year were films that similarly prioritised atmosphere over plot mechanics. Against those, HIM's visual ambition stands out. It's also more cohesive in its first two acts than most entries in this sub-genre manage.

What it lacks, compared to the better examples of this type, is a final act that delivers on accumulated dread. The films that work in this space — and there are several on the best series streaming now list that do analogous things in the long-form format — tend to find a moment that crystallises all the unease into something cathartic or devastating. HIM doesn't quite get there.

As of early 2026, this is the critical consensus — though it's worth noting that reappraisal is already underway in certain critical circles who argued the film was reviewed too quickly, too close to its theatrical debut.

Should You Actually Watch HIM?

Yes, with an asterisk the size of its runtime.

Watch HIM if: you find slow-burn psychological horror satisfying on its own terms, you're comfortable with films that withhold explicit meaning, or you want to see what committed visual filmmaking looks like in the contemporary horror space.

Skip HIM if: you want a conventional horror thriller, coherent plotting matters more to you than atmosphere, or you bounced off similar films like Lamb, Men, or The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

The 44% audience score doesn't mean HIM is bad. It means it was sold to the wrong audience. Knowing which audience you belong to saves you two-plus hours of potential frustration — or guarantees you'll find something genuinely rewarding.

If you're also tracking where to find content like this across platforms without manually checking each one, WatchDeck's multi-service management tools are built for exactly that problem — one place to track expiring titles, new additions, and platform-specific horror libraries.

For similar reading on another recent film that divided critics along comparable lines — ambitious, visually distinctive, thematically polarising — the Avatar: Fire and Ash reviews breakdown is worth comparing. Different genre, same pattern of critical-versus-audience split.

And if HIM leaves you wanting more horror content across platforms, the best movies currently streaming roundup covers the strongest genre picks available right now.

FAQ

Why did people not like HIM (2025)? Most negative audience reactions to HIM stem from a mismatch between the film's marketing and its actual content. It was sold as a mainstream psychological thriller but delivers an experimental, deliberately obscure horror film that avoids narrative resolution. The 44% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes — versus 62% from critics — reflects that gap.

Did HIM get good reviews from critics? HIM received mixed-to-cautiously-positive reviews from professional critics. Its Rotten Tomatoes score sat at approximately 62% as of late March 2026. Critics praised its visual craft and lead performance while frequently criticising its opaque third act and excessive runtime.

Is HIM (2025) a hit or a flop? HIM is a modest commercial disappointment. Its domestic theatrical run earned approximately $9.4 million against an estimated $18–22 million production budget. It moved to Max streaming within six weeks of theatrical release and performed well enough there to appear in the platform's US top-10 for two weeks.

What was the point of the movie HIM? HIM uses horror imagery to explore masculine self-deception and the psychological cost of refusing introspection. The film's monster is best understood as an externalisation of the protagonist's unexamined psychology. The title refers both to the specific character and to a broader cultural archetype of men who want to be seen without being known.

Where can I watch HIM (2025)? HIM is available on Max as of March 2026, following its theatrical run. Streaming availability may vary by region.

Is HIM similar to other A24-style horror films? HIM shares DNA with slow-burn arthouse horror films like Men (2022), Lamb (2021), and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017). It prioritises atmosphere and thematic ambition over conventional plotting. Viewers who enjoyed those films are the most likely audience for HIM.