After the raw crazy of Malignant back in 2021, you better believe I was hyped for what James Wan and writer Akela Cooper had planned next. And man, it’s been a while since I was completely on-board with a film right from the literal first scene it shows, here in the form of a mocked-up ad for the in-universe Perpetual Pets. Aside from initially tricking me into thinking it was an actual ad, it does a terrific job of setting up the Uncanny tone of the film to follow.
More so than Malignant, this film reminded me strongly of two other features: The 2019 Child’s Play remake, and the Orphan movies, First Kill in particular. Like Child’s Play, it’s a tech-savvy spin on the possessed doll trope, and its main source of terror comes from a similar acknowledgement that what M3GAN does here isn’t really because of a malfunction; she’s just doing what she was designed to do. And like with First Kill, there’s a consistent tone of high camp to everything going on, from the grislier murder scenes to just the regular conversations between characters.
Out of that campness comes some of the most prevalent instances of mindfrag I’m expecting to get all year. There are no half-measures when it gets to admitting how ridiculous the premise is on its own, and it fully embraces it at every turn. Gerard Johnstone’s direction helps a lot with that, applying that particular balancing act with its comedy that seems to be an innate ability among New Zealand filmmakers, but Jenna Davis’ vocal performance as M3GAN herself really makes it all work. As the embodiment of the film’s tongue-in-cheek approach to commenting on modern technology and our growing reliance on it, her and that Aperture Science Sentry Turret filter on her voice manage to be more unsettling than any amount of gore could be on its own. Which given the film’s considerably tamer rating compared to Malignant is certainly appreciated.
Not to say that the film isn’t outright scary, though. The extent to which it leans into its own silliness occasionally gets in the way of creating tension, as do the reliance on jump scares (which, to the film’s credit, isn’t reliant on Anthony Willis’ soundtrack to work), but there are still some genuinely tense moments here. Seeing M3GAN explain how she would paralyse someone has a similar effect to seeing Doris from Ouija: Origin of Evil describe being strangled to death, and being able to draw that kind of comparison out of me might be one of the nicest things I can say about a modern horror flick.
But for as bizarre as it gets whenever M3GAN starts singing seemingly out of nowhere (I don’t think they intended to throw shade at Sia by using one of her songs in here, but it works surprisingly well in context to the whole Music debacle), and for as balls-to-the-wall crazy as the finale turns out, there’s a lot of legitimate and brainy drama in here. Again, like with Malignant, there’s a strong core of family drama to this, involving M3GAN’s creator Gemma (Allison Williams) and her niece Cady (Violet McGraw). Gemma initially breaks out M3GAN to help Cady deal with the death of her parents, and both of their performances venture close to being even more unnerving than M3GAN herself.
With Gemma, it’s because she personifies the hubris surrounding the way we treat technology, especially when it comes to ‘screen time’ for kids; it’s not a matter of ‘technology bad’, but rather the extent to which we willingly let it do seemingly everything, even when it isn’t even designed for such tasks. And with Cady, not only does she behave and react like an actual kid, rather than the idealised version of one, but the way she lets all that grief and eventual attachment to the doll hang off her body language is quite impactful. When M3GAN gets brought into that equation, what we get is a story that is much more focused on the trials of parenting than anything explicitly sci-fi.
It says something about the way we just hand kids off to the digital brain and say “take care of this”, when our approach to the responsibility of flesh-and-blood adults raising children has about the same amount of forethought to it. Like… we really do expect them to be totally fine and dealt with under that circumstance, even if the person/tech being given this kid to care for might not even be prepared or designed to handle it. But hey, the alternative is right there if you need it… even if it’s about as ready for the task as you are.
But I can’t front: It’s this film’s impressive display of horror-comedy that makes it wholeheartedly worth checking out. Getting that kind of balance, where the scares and the jokes don’t undermine each other, isn’t easy, but by staying totally cognisant of how silly the premise is on its face, it manages to both deliver on that silliness while also managing to use it to give some worthy Black Mirror-style commentary. It’s an absolute riot, and if you’re willing to approach it with the attitude that not knowing whether to be scared or to laugh at what’s going on is a feature, not a bug, chances are you’ll have a good time with it.
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