Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Gerard Johnstone
Starring: Alison Williams, Violet McGraw, Ronny Chieng, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Jen Van Epps, Lori Dungey, Stephane
Garneau-Monten
M3GAN is a high tech evolution of a type of
movie that has its roots in the 1956 thriller The Bad Seed, in which Patty McCormack played an innocent looking, pigtailed kid
with homicidal tendencies. Drawing on the novelty of a diminutive
killer, we saw several imitations, but we also got a spin-off sub-genre
beginning with the 1963 'Living Doll' episode of
The Twilight Zone in which the miniature menaces weren't
human but rather toys or robots. The apex of this is of course 1988's
Child's Play, which unleashed the iconic Chucky onto the world and gave us
imitations like 1991's Dolly Dearest, the movie M3GAN arguably shares the most DNA
with.
The appeal of Child's Play and
Dolly Dearest is in seeing children's toys inhabited
through supernatural means by psychotic killers, spewing foul-mouthed
tirades as they use their wits to take down humans six times their
height.
The recent reboot of Child's Play
missed this point by making Chucky a defective robotic toy, erasing
everything that made the character so much fun in the first place.
If you're worried M3GAN might be as dry as that
ill-advised remake, you needn't worry. While it may feature a villain
that's 100% artificial intelligence, director
Gerard Johnstone and screenwriter Akela Cooper exploit
their villain's very inhumanity for both scares and laughs.
Gemma (Alison Williams) is a robotics genius slumming it by
working for a toy company that produces uninspired product lines.
Unbeknownst to her boss she's been secretly working on a prototype -
Model 3 Generative Android, or M3GAN for short. M3GAN is a lifelike doll
designed to "pair" with a child and adapt to their specific needs to
become a sort of substitute best friend/sister. When Gemma finds herself
lumbered with guardianship of her niece Cady (Violet McGraw),
whose parents were killed in a freak accident, she struggles to bond
with the kid. That is until Cady stumbles across a robot Gemma made back
in college. Seeing how fascinated Cady is with her earlier creation,
Gemma decides to press on and finish work on M3GAN, essentially using
Cady as a test subject.
M3GAN is an instant hit with the kid, who becomes attached to the
android. The feeling is mutual, but the trouble is M3GAN grows a little
too over-protective of Cady and begins dispatching anything or anyone
she views as a threat to the child. Seems Gemma forgot to programme
M3GAN with Asimov's three laws of robotics, or at least the
all-important first law which states "A robot may not injure a human
being."
If you've seen any variation of the Bad Seed theme you'll
be familiar with the plot beats of this latest update. We know the
neighbour's dog is going to get it at some point. We know the snot-nosed
bullying kid will get their comeuppance. We know M3GAN will be forced to
turn on the closest thing she has to a mother. But with movies like this
the fun is in the familiarity, and there's a cosy satisfaction in seeing
how the film updates decades old tropes. The movie is commendably
nasty, refusing to let children and animals off the hook when it comes
to potential victims of M3GAN's ire, but it's all played with its tongue
firmly in its cheek so it never feels mean spirited. The death of a kid
can often come off as crassly exploitative, but it can also be
hilarious, as is the case with one particular denouement here.
The thrillers that have come from the Blumhouse stable usually stumble
when they attempt social satire with a straight face (think of the awful
Purge
series, the embarrassingly bad
Black Christmas
remake and whatever Run Sweetheart Run was), but their best movies are those that employ satire (Happy Death Day,
Freaky) for straight up comic effect. M3GAN is an addition to the latter camp, opening with
a Robocop-esque commercial for a children's toy that establishes the tone of the
film – i.e. a heightened version of our current world. Combining horror,
comedy and sci-fi, M3GAN satirises the state of parenting
in the age of tablets and smartphones. M3GAN the android comes with an
Off switch, and a lot of parents probably wish their kids were similarly
equipped. Toys were traditionally made for children to play together or
with their parents, but today's toys (if tablets and phones can even be
called "toys") essentially serve as substitute Off switches, with
parents sticking a device in their kid's hands whenever they want a few
hours to themselves. Gemma employs her robot creation in similar
fashion, and it's only when she realises that she's allowed a piece of
technology to take over the duties of a parent that she fully grasps the
horror of what she's unleashed.
Other recent similar movies have failed to create an iconic villain (Annabelle
is a non-starter because it asks us to fear an inanimate object), but
M3GAN instantly captured the imagination as soon as the first trailer
appeared. The filmmakers say her look was modelled on Grace Kelly and Kim
Novak, but she bears more than a passing resemblance to Charlize Theron.
The similarly themed recent seasonal slasher
Christmas Bloody Christmas
never managed to convince us its android antagonist was anything more
than a man in a costume, but M3GAN will have you wondering if some
dazzling combination of robotics, puppetry and a human performer has
been employed to pull off a convincing effect.
Johnstone mines a lot of unsettling menace from M3GAN's dead-eyed
stare, but what's creepiest about the creation is the way it absorbs
information, clawing its way a little further up the side of the uncanny
valley with each new nugget of knowledge it acquires. The more human
M3GAN becomes, the more of a threat she poses. M3GAN is a living, four
foot tall embodiment of those very modern threats like keystroke
readers, hacked webcams etc, which are designed to figure out who we are
and use that information against us. A closing shot may have viewers
reassessing just what sort of intrusive technology they allow into their
homes.
