Malignant

I’ve written before about how I’m not the biggest fan of James Wan’s movies. For some reason a lot of people in the horror movie fandom insisted on holding contrary views, but now, with the release of Malignant, even the hardcore Wanheads are coming around to the correct opinion. What about this movie caused such a shift in mindset? Let’s put on a backwards trenchcoat and scurry through some holes to find out.

I’m first going to describe how Malignant presents itself in its opening minutes, then I’m going to give a full-spoiler run-down of where the plot ends up going.

Back in 1993, some doctors and scientists are keeping a young girl with some sort of monster growing out of her back in an absurdly gothic medical facility. The monster, which is named Gabriel, goes on a rampage using a combination of psychic(?) powers and super-strength, which it apparently has when it’s controlling the girl’s body.

Actually, let me back up for a second. What exactly is happening here is, I think, meant to be a mystery, given that the characters spend most of the movie trying to figure out the protagonist’s past, except it’s...not a mystery, because it’s extremely obvious what’s happening, and just in case you didn’t put it together from the on-screen action, there’s an opening credits sequence that gives it away even more clearly.

This is why I decided to just spoil the entire movie up-front: I honestly can’t tell what even counts as a spoiler here. The prologue gives the game away to such an extent that it seems like the filmmakers can’t have been trying to build a mystery, but if that’s the case then it’s weird that the rest of the movie treats all of this information like it is a mystery.

Anyway, the lead doctor dramatically announced that they have to “cut out the cancer.” Cut to twenty seven years later, where our protagonist Madison--who is the girl from the prologue with the monster growing out of her back, but again, I’m not sure if we’re supposed to have figured that out--is living in a scary house with her abusive husband. The husband slams her head into a wall during an argument over the fact that she keeps miscarrying pregnancies, then later that night is violently murdered by a ghost or something.

Madison starts having terrifying hallucinations of a long-haired figure killing people, and quickly realizes that the “visions” are actual murders, which she’s seeing as they happen. Also, the victims are all medical professionals who were treating an eight year old girl named Emily May, who, just to reiterate, is absolutely Madison, a fact which the movie treats like a big twist even though “Emily” looks almost identical to the adult Madison, down to having the exact same hair-style. Like, they look so similar that when the lead detective finds the photo of Emily from the doctors’ medical records, I just assumed that meant he had realized they were the same person, because there’s no way he wouldn’t have, but in fact that is not the case.

It turns out that Madison/Emily was born with a partially-absorbed twin named Gabriel growing out of her body. In addition to being a gross evil lobster-person thing, Gabriel can broadcast his thoughts through radio speakers and...turn invisible, I guess? There’s a bit at the start of the movie that implies he’s invisible, but then he doesn’t turn invisible during scenes where it would be advantageous to do so. But anyway, Madison’s mom couldn’t deal with her daughter’s evil monster-twin and gave her to the scientists at Hogwarts to see if they could make Gabriel not be evil. It turned out they couldn’t, so they decided to just cut him off like a big tumour. The only complication is that the two siblings shared part of their nervous system, which couldn’t be removed without harming Madison, but other than that the operation seemed to succeed: Madison was adopted and had no memories of having a lobster-twin growing out of her back or of being at Arkham Asylum, because…..

But then Madison’s husband slammed her head against the wall and reawakened Gabriel, who decided to go on a murder-rampage against all of the people responsible for trying to kill him when he was a child. He achieves this by putting on a leather trenchcoat and doing sick John Wick martial arts moves on people.

No, seriously.

So where do we even start with this? First off, if you’re the kind of person who likes to nit-pick stories--and I am--then you can really go to town on the many implausibilities inherent in the premise. Just off the top of my head, removing Gabriel from Madison would have left behind massive surgical scars, which Madison doesn’t have. The movie sort of tries to explain this by establishing that the doctor who did the operation is a world-renowned child reconstructive surgeon, but Gabriel looks like he’s taking up a full third of child-Madison’s torso. Removing him without killing her feels like a stretch, never mind doing it without leaving a single trace behind.

A much bigger nit-pick--and one that makes me really question how this screenplay took shape--is the fact that Madison’s younger sister Sydney doesn’t know that Madison was adopted until Madison tells her early in the movie.

Why not? Why would that have been kept from her? She also didn’t seem to know that Madison doesn’t remember her pre-adoption life, which is even more implausible. Did it never come up in twenty seven years? They never got into a conversation about the time before Sydney was born? Sydney never found it odd that there’s no photos of Madison before the age of eight, or that her parents never talked about what she was like as a baby or a toddler?

I think the story is written like this to put a greater emphasis on Madison’s main--and pretty much only--character trait, which is that she yearns for a “blood connection” with someone. This is implied to be a lingering effect of Gabriel’s presence rather than just the usual thing of an adopted kid wanting to find their biological family, and the main way it manifests in the movie is Madison really wanting to have a baby.

Okay, fine, but since the movie opens with her husband and unborn child both dying, this aspect of her character can’t actually motivate her to do anything. It could have been a source of tension by giving her a reason to stay with the husband despite his abuse, and a desire to protecc babby when the action kicks off, but in the movie as written, it’s just another reason for Madison to weep copiously, which is more or less the only thing she does when she’s not screaming.

Malignant feels like five different movies smashed awkwardly together, which I think is where a lot of these issues are coming from. The brief scenes of Madison’s childhood after she’s adopted read like more typical James Wan fare, and you can easily imagine a version of the movie that started from there where Gabriel was just a demon or something. “Period piece about a young girl/girls getting spooped by demons” is about two thirds of the Conjuringverse, after all.

But then layered on top of that you’ve got the initial horror scenes that feel like generic haunted house material, then some murder mystery/slasher stuff with the detectives trying to track down Gabriel, and then towards the end it becomes a straight-up action movie. The end product is chaotic and disjointed, like you’re watching a fan edit where someone spliced a bunch of different short films together.

It doesn’t help that the whole thing is severely over-directed. I think James Wan goes way over the top in all of his movies to begin with, but here it’s almost at the level of self-parody: constant gimmicky camera tricks, that ridiculous opening credits sequence, and a musical score that’s bizarrely intense given the unremarkable nature of what’s happening on screen most of the time (although we do get an edgy trailer version of Where Is My Mind that slaps pretty hard).

You might at this point have gotten the impression that Malignant is a hilarious laugh-a-minute hate-watch, but that’s only really true towards the end of the movie when the John Wick action scenes kick in. Up until that point it’s just dull and repetitive, recycling nearly-identical haunted house scenes and murders and strung along by a “mystery” that the viewer will likely already have worked out the answer to.

(This was supposed to be longer bug oops migraines, yololololo)