Yesterday I watched GOAT. I slept with it and woke up with it—and perhaps that says more about the film than any technical analysis. Because GOAT resonates. It disturbs. It lingers. And perhaps it lingers precisely because it touches on a point that cinema rarely dares to confront with such brutality: the physical and symbolic pain of sport.
Directed by Justin Tipping and sponsored by Jordan Peele, the film follows Cameron “Cam” Cade (Tyriq Withers), a young, rising quarterback who, after a near-fatal injury, receives a second chance from his greatest idol, Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). What begins as a dream turns into a ritualistic nightmare—a plunge into toxic masculinity, idolatry, and the boundaries between training, torture, and transcendence.
The title GOAT — Greatest of All Time — is more than an acronym for greatness; it’s a sentence. The quest for the “best of all” becomes literal and monstrous when the GOATs’ lineage is revealed as a succession of sacrificed bodies, transferred blood, inherited power. There’s something both religious and profane about this cycle: each generation of athletes devours the previous, an explicit metaphor for the society that consumes its heroes to the bone.
As a viewer and as a screenwriter, I found myself torn. There’s a powerful idea there—a body horror that speaks to the pressure of performance, to the body as a battlefield and the mind as a minefield. There are moments when the film finds this pulsating flesh, especially when Cam trains under the scorching desert sun, and sweat seems to blend with madness. But between the second and third acts, the narrative loses its way: the metaphors become too literal, the visuals repeat formulas, and the climax feels rushed—more concerned with shock than with depth.
As an athlete, I recognize what the film is trying to convey: the sacrifice, the pressure, the emptiness after glory. That place where only pain keeps you going. But as someone who lives for cinema, I missed rhythm, subtlety, and visual consistency. The photography and editing flirt with something interesting—the X-ray flashes, the shifting color temperatures—but end up becoming excessive and predictable.
Even so, GOAT touched me on a personal level: this intertwining of body and mind, faith and pain, the dream and nightmare of being “the best.” There’s a fine line between overcoming and self-destruction, and the film walks precisely that line—stumbling, at times, but leaving its mark.
In the end, the blood that flows from Cam’s body is the same blood that flows from anyone who has ever tried to be too perfect at something. GOAT isn’t a perfect film, but a cracked mirror—and sometimes it’s in those mirrors that we recognize ourselves most.
You can find The Goat in theaters.
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