Just a Doll!
Writ3r Ak3la Coop3r r3stor3s th3 fun to th3 kill3r doll sub-g3nr3 with th3 p3rf3ctly pitch3d ‘M3GAN’.
M3GAN
Director: Gerard Johnstone • Writer: Akela Cooper
Starring: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis, Jen Van Epps, Ronny Chieng, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Lori Dungey, Stephane Garneau-Monten
USA • 1hr 42mins
Opens Hong Kong January 12 • IIB
Grade: B+
By now we’ve all seen the loosey-goosey jig the freaky-creepy AI doll from M3GAN does on social media, but thankfully that’s not the high point of the film. It’s close, but there are others, in gleeful defiance of showing all the best parts in the trailer. Hopes are through the roof for this one given the track record of the major players involved: producer James Wan (known for directing Aquaman and The Conjuring), go-to horror factory Blumhouse (Paranormal Activity, Get Out, The Purge, The Invisible Man) and writer Akela Cooper, responsible for Wan’s batshit awesome Malignant. Would it be a case of too many cooks or just the right spice?
Lucky for us it’s the latter. M3GAN balances humour, eeriness and depth in its efficient storytelling, buoyed by enough self-awareness to keep it happily in its lane. The film knows what it is, knows what we want, and so turns in a swift, clever, thoroughly entertaining IIB comedy-chiller. Originally edited to be R-rated (rumour has it an unrated director’s cut with a fatter kill count is on the way), the film trades in our (mostly) natural apprehension yet causal acceptance of ultra-advanced tech and artificial intelligence, (again, mostly) women’s parental anxiety and grief. With a few jokes about toy collectors, Terminator shout-outs and startled teachers thrown in for good measure.
The singularity is coming
After her parents die in a snowy car wreck, 10-ish Cady (Violet McGraw) is packed off to live with her maternal aunt, Gemma (by far the most interesting of the Girls, Allison Williams), a roboticist who is entirely unprepared to raise a child. Gemma works at tech toy company Funki, and she and her crew, Tess and Cole (Jen Van Epps and Brian Jordan Alvarez) are under the gun to finish an upgrade on a Furby-type interactive pet thingy. Needless to say she neglects Cady beyond telling her not to touch her stuff and to use coasters. In an attempt to make it up to her Gemma reboots her failed attempt to win brownie points with Funki CEO David Lin (Ronny Chieng, brilliant) – the M3GAN, a Model 3 Generative Android. The life-size, AI-powered companion doll initially picks up the parenting slack for Gemma, but learns so fast Gemma decides to show it off to Lin, who immediately fast-tracks production. Before you can say “child’s play” M3GAN and Cady develop a murderous co-dependency.
Director Gerard Johnstone has one feature under his belt (2014’s non-entity Housebound), so the real heavy lifting is left to Cooper, also a producer on the stellar (sorry) Star Trek: Strange New Worlds who penned two of the first season’s best episodes. She also wrote for Luke Cage and The 100, so she knows her way around a genre piece. Her script plays with the expected killer doll tropes – there are threats to a budding incel bully, a suspicious therapist, a pain-in-the-ass neighbour – and she gets almost effortless support from Amie Donald’s physicality as the body of M3GAN (Jenna Davis provides the voice). Johnstone and Cooper take their time normalising the tech – she’s no more threatening than Gemma’s Siri – and letting M3GAN worm her way into Cady’s life – and head. They similarly give the cast the room to have a blast and lean into the little details that make her low-key sinister. Bottom line M3GAN is fun, something the recent so-called, not-really-a-thing “elevated horror” movement (Hereditary, The Babadook) abandoned in favour of prestige. Or something. M3GAN pulls its head out of its ass and sits back to revel in a robot doing a homicidal shimmy. That’s never going to get old. — DEK
Dolls. Parts.
Pin (1988), d: Sandor Stern
Breaking Bad’s Mike Ehrmantraut voices the killer doll manifesting a young man’s jumbled mind in this under the radar Canadian weirdo.
Dead Silence (2007), d: James Wan
Is there anything creepier than a ventriloquist’s doll? No. No, there is not. And the Saw duo proves it in this (now) cult classic.
Child’s Play (2019), d: Lars Klevberg
Yeah, Brad Dourif’s original Chucky rules, but Luke Skywalker’s modern, AI-tinged reboot has its own grisly, hilarious charms.