Magazine Dreams 2025

Killian Maddox is a mentally ill grocery store worker obsessed with bodybuilding. He lives with his grandfather (“Paw-Paw”) as a result of his father committing murder–suicide against his mother. His dream to be the best in bodybuilding aids in creating negative behaviors, with the steroids he takes to support his physique leading to physical ailings. Killian has frequent, recurring, emotional outbursts and appears unable to express his true emotions.

As he prepares for a show, he attempts to ask out his love interest, Jessie, at the grocery store where he works. In fact, he asks her out while he’s shopping, only to walk out awkwardly. He is also obsessed with fitness champion Brad who does not reply to Killian’s written letters. Killian talks about his bodybuilding goals and admiration for Brad in his written letters. Killian also includes his phone number, hoping Brad would call. Killian threatens a local painter’s shop as the owner refuses to repaint his grandfather’s house due to his ‘Paw-Paw’s’ claims of thin paint needing another coat; eventually destroying the shop’s windows and inventory.

Killian takes out Jessie to dinner, where he trauma dumps about the deaths of his parents before devolving into an intense monologue expressing his bodybuilding dreams. Jessie leaves him at the restaurant. He’s distraught as he focuses on his next fitness show. Immediately before the next show, the local painter owner’s nephew and friends assault him. Despite the beating, he drives to the show. He steps on stage and begins to pose, only to pass out. He wakes up in a bathtub, icing his body.

Following the disaster of a show, Killian hides his true dark and violent feelings and real-life happenings from his counselor, eventually picking up Pink Coat with the intent to have sex, only to be unable to continue after she demands no kissing. Killian’s spiral continues: he is fired from his job, he encounters the owner’s nephew again, with his family, in a diner, causing a threatening scene, and he begins purchasing and assembling guns.

Unexpectedly, Brad calls, inviting Killian to a photo shoot. Brad pursues an affair with Killian, and the two sleep together. Following their anonymous sex meet-up, Brad returns to being unresponsive to Killian’s attempts at contact. Killian, in turn, continues fantasizing about murder. He breaks into the home of a judge who provided a criticism that he returns to several times over at earlier points in the film, forcing him (at gunpoint) to strip and pose.

Killian then attends Brad’s posing show armed with a gun and fantasizes shooting and killing Brad on stage during a disorienting montage sequence featuring previous moments from Killian’s life, including interactions with his parents as a child; though Killian ultimately leaves without shooting. Upon returning home, he breaks down in his Paw-Paw’s arms, dissembles his gun, throwing it away near a set of train tracks, dumps his steroids into a toilet, and commences flexing, yet again, in his garage, reiterating his still-existing bodybuilding dreams in voiceover narration.