MATCH (2025)

Studio:   Tubi
Director: Danishka Esterhazy
Writer:   Jon Kaplan, Al Kaplan
Producer: Adam Friedlander, Tebogo Maila
Stars:    Humberly Gonzalez, Shaeane Jimenez, Dianne Simpson, Jacques Adriaanse, Luke Volker, Nikita Faber, Dean Goldblum, Peter Butler, Alex McGregor

Review Score:

---

Summary:

A lovelorn woman ends up navigating a house of horrors after trying to meet a promising match from a dating app.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

After a frustrating series of disappointing dates, 27-year-old restaurant server Paola excitedly tells her sister Maria about Henry, a promising match she recently found on a dating app. Maria warns her sister against going to Henry’s house for their first date, but Paola explains Henry has an autoimmune disorder that prevents him from going out. Agreeing that it would be unwise to not verify Henry’s identity further, Paola arranges a video call with him, but it quickly freezes and cuts off.

Paola and Maria share a phone call with their blind father, Papa, during which they discuss visiting him before his upcoming surgery. The sisters also sing “Cielito Lindo” to him.

Paola goes to Henry’s house for their date. Henry’s sickly mother Lucille invites Paola inside. Although the woman makes her uncomfortable, Paola drinks a glass of wine at Lucille’s insistence. As the situation grows increasingly awkward, Paola starts texting Henry and hears notifications coming from Lucille’s phone. Before she can leave, Paola falls unconscious from drugs Lucille put in her drink.

Paola wakes up restrained to a wheelchair. Lucille escorts her into a dirty room where Paola discovers Henry is a horribly disfigured mute. After Lucille leaves them alone, Henry pulls down his pants and approaches Paola, causing Paola to throw up at the disgusting sight of Henry with an erection. Henry slips on the vomit and accidentally knocks himself out. Paola breaks free from her restraints and escapes to a hallway where she badly injures her bare foot in a mousetrap.

The next morning, Maria becomes concerned when she sees Paola didn’t come home and will miss their planned visit with Papa. Impersonating Paola, Lucille answers Maria’s text messages, but Maria finds the responses suspicious.

Horrified upon finding her son collapsed, Lucille brings Henry into a bathroom where Paola is hiding. Lucille expresses anger over not having a grandchild when Henry indicates he was unable to “perform” with Paola like Lucille instructed. To remind him what to do, Lucille has Henry think about Paola while she masturbates him. After he climaxes, Lucille sends Henry to search for Paola.

Henry finds Paola hiding in a room of mutilated bodies from his previous attempts at procreation. Paola and Henry struggle. Henry attempts to force himself onto Paola, but she triggers a mousetrap on his penis and flees.

Posing as an attractive Henry once again, Lucille sexts with an interested woman named Natalie. Seeing Natalie as a better option for breeding, Lucille instructs Henry to kill Paola.

Paola is pulled into another room by the man she spoke to on her video call and whose photos were used for Henry’s profile. The handsome man identifies himself as Eli. Chained to a bed with both feet cut off, Eli claims he became a captive after Lucille catfished him, and he has been forced to help her lure victims to the house ever since.

Paola and Eli begin forming a romantic connection by discussing their ill parents. Paola convinces Eli to help her fight back against Lucille and Henry to escape. The two of them pull off a plan that distracts Henry while Paola recovers the wheelchair to make Eli mobile.

With the police not taking her suspicion of danger seriously, Maria tracks her sister’s phone to the house. Through a window, Maria spies Lucille preparing drugged wine and handling Paola’s phone. Previously summoned to help find her sister, Paola’s ex-boyfriend Ryan joins Maria outside.

Natalie arrives at the house to meet Henry. Despite being extremely disappointed to discover she lied in her profile and doesn’t resemble her pictures, Lucille invites Natalie inside with the intention of drugging her for Henry anyway. Their conversation becomes additionally uncomfortable as Lucille continually insults Natalie’s age, weight, and appearance.

Before Lucille can inject Natalie with a syringe, Maria and Ryan knock at the door. Following an accusatory confrontation with Lucille, Maria and Ryan push their way inside. Lucille quickly takes Maria hostage, but Natalie knocks her out from behind.

Maria, Ryan, and Natalie team up to find Paola. Paola accidentally knocks her sister unconscious when the trio rounds a corner to join her and Eli.

Ryan stays behind for a faceoff with Henry while Eli leads Paola and Natalie in carrying Maria away. Henry ends up killing Ryan by bashing his head with a spiked baseball bat. After catching up to the others, Henry kills Natalie by forcing his thumbs into her eye sockets.

Henry becomes distracted by a call from Papa on Paola’s phone. Referring to Eli, Paola indicates to her father that she finally met someone, which angers Henry. Upon regaining consciousness, Maria begins singing “Cielito Lindo.” Paola joins in, comforting Papa and soothing Henry at the same time. Paola then uses the opening to embed the spiked bat into Henry’s back.

Paola, Maria, and Eli escape to the kitchen, but they are stopped by Lucille firing a bullet into Maria. Lucille reveals Eli is actually her second son, but she turned on him in favor of Henry because Eli is impotent. Although he claims he didn’t want to help his mother, Paola is upset to learn Eli lied.

Maria attacks Lucille, which causes Lucille to accidentally shoot Eli in his chest. Lucille also kills Maria by gruesomely slashing her throat with a broken wine bottle.

Lucille confronts Paola, now the sole survivor, at gunpoint. Henry interrupts. Lucille begins behaving belligerently toward her monstrous son, motivating him to break his mother’s limbs and beat her to death. Paola escapes outside.

Paola goes on to have a tearful visit with Papa in the hospital. Later, Paola prepares to delete the dating app from her phone, but she reconsiders when she is notified of a new match.

---

Review:

Tubi’s free streaming service is terrific for classic TV shows and popular movies, as long as you don’t mind that nearly none of that content comes from the current decade. Tubi’s original horror films? Those are another story, and that story usually starts with low quality and ends with high dissatisfaction.

“Tubi” carries such little weight as a banner for original horror that the movie “Match” went understandably unnoticed when it debuted in 2025. Two things convinced me to take a flyer on the film anyway.

The first was faint buzz scattered on social media among the few people who actually watched “Match” but had been pleasantly impressed. The second was seeing Danishka Esterhazy listed as the director. Esterhazy previously helmed “The Banana Splits Movie” in 2019 (review here) and the 2021 “Slumber Party Massacre” reboot (review here). While upset viewers voiced displeasure over how Esterhazy inverted expectations for venerable IP, I found her irreverent instincts for subversive style appealing, which made me anxious to see how she might make “Match” similarly screwy.

Esterhazy did not disappoint. Neither does “Match.” So if you also enjoyed her other efforts for being off the wall even if they’re a little rough around their B-movie edges, you’d be doing yourself a favor by giving this one a go.

Meet Paola. Introduced by being blasted with the rotting contents of a broken garbage bag at work, the 27-year-old server has been unlucky in love for some time. For her, the dating game is an unbroken series of self-centered douchebags, ex-obsessed cyberstalkers, casual racists, and crude dudes who send unsolicited dick pics. That is, until she swipes right on Henry, whose handsome photos and articulate texts make the man look like a match made in heaven.

“Match” knows you’ve seen this setup before, including the types of people just described, and the familiar manners in which they’re presented. That’s why energetic editing breezes through this part in under four minutes. Zipping past essential background bits to get to the gruesomeness as fast as possible is the main matter on this movie’s mind.

After a little more exposition to establish Paola’s sensible sister Maria and their hospitalized father, Paola gets a ride to Henry’s home for their first date. Maria warned Paola not to go there until she’d actually seen or even talked to Henry in person. But Paola explains Henry has an autoimmune disorder that’s made him housebound. She tried communicating over video too, except that call quickly froze and cut off. Besides, it’s been so long since Paola’s head flipped over her heels for a guy, and she has a good feeling about this.

Paola’s Spider-Sense should have started tingling when a sickly woman named Lucille answers the door instead of Henry. It does to a degree, just not enough to do anything yet. Identifying herself as Henry’s mother, Lucille invites Paola inside for a glass of wine while waiting for her son. Once again, Paola knows better than to sip with a stranger, but she doesn’t want to appear rude. You know what happens next. Paola soon falls unconscious. When she wakes up, she finds herself in a nightmarish maze fit for a Halloween haunt, only this one features real danger, real corpses, and a real monster.

It's entirely reasonable for someone to roll their eyes at the dumb decisions characters like Paola repeatedly make throughout the movie, though they should realize those ill-advised actions are features, not bugs. Trope-y behavior is baked into the story’s design. The way “Match” gets away with it is by having a perverted sense of humor whose off-kilter tone makes sense for overlooking unrealistic inclusions like a labyrinthine home composed of seemingly endless corridors or a furious finale where people are bonked on their noggins more times than Larry and Curly in a Three Stooges short. “Match” isn’t quite a comedy, but it’s not meant to be stiffly serious either.

Potential viewers should be advised that sexual assault comes into play more than once. Those instances aren’t particularly graphic or seen through to completion, although shots of incestuous masturbation and a grotesque penis fighting to be freed from a mousetrap can’t say the same. Such scenes sound repulsive when recounted out of context. In context with the movie’s gleeful glorification of grossness, the shocks end up being more enjoyable than one might imagine without seeing them in entertaining action.

“Match” gets additional mileage out of a quality cast that understands their assignments, whether they’re playing a hero with heart or a sicko villain. Given little dialogue for most of the movie, Humberly Gonzalez instead attracts audience engagement through expressive physicality, maintaining a charismatic aura for Paola without using words. As Lucille, Dianne Simpson portrays a standard crazy mother stereotype, yet she tops it with a Goldilocks dollop of relish that’s neither too hammy nor too evil. Others do a lot with little roles, making distinct impressions even though they may only have a few minutes of screentime, especially Nikita Faber, who runs through a complete, fun arc as next in line to take Paola’s unfortunate place as a victim.

If “Match” had been shot on film in the 1970s, it would have become a cult classic a long time ago for its skin-crawling weirdness that’s still snicker-worthy in a wicked way. Suspenseful, surprising, and funny when it wants to be, “Match” is a pure horror film splashed with an amusing amount of twistedness. There doesn’t have to be a hurry. Just add the movie to your watchlist and remember it as an option the next time you’re flipping for something offbeat and a little under-the-radar to pass the time on Tubi.

Review Score: 80

---