James Wan isn’t trying redefine the horror movie for the third time, following Saw in 2004 and Insidious in 2011. He’s just
There will be few spoilers beyond first-act plot and what’s revealed in the theatrical trailers. James Wan isn’t trying to redefine the horror movie for the third time, following Saw in 2004 and Insidious in 2011. No, his latest original horror romp, Malignant, just wants to rock and/or roll and get the audience dancing to its specific beat. I’m not quite sure why Warner Bros. mostly hid this one from the press, but this is one of the better “hidden from critics” horror movies, I don’t know, ever? Its arch tone and macabre humor will throw off some folks, and the film certainly goes in some “take it or leave it” directions. But when your last two “big” movies ( Furious 7 and Aquaman) essentially “saved” two different studios’ most valuable IP (while the middle one Conjuring 2 cemented a viable cinematic universe), you can afford to party with the boss’s credit card. Annabelle Wallis’ Madison Mitchell is stuck in an abusive marriage, a situation compounded by a history of recent miscarriages. After a violent outburst results in a bloody head injury, she is doubly traumatized when a mysterious… something attacks the both of them with horrific consequences. Without going into details better left to the film itself, Madison’s recovery dovetails with a series of grisly murders seemingly carried out by her assailant, with the caveat that she has been cursed by real-time visions of these ghoulish crimes. The cops (a dynamic Mulder/Scully-like duo played by George Young and Michole Briana White) are sympathetic to a point, and there are some odd coincidences related to unrevealed or suppressed childhood traumas, but at some point our bereaved heroine starts to look less like a victim and more like a murderer. First, you should know that the Seattle-set chiller has a much larger scale than what’s teased by the two (comparatively minimalist) trailers. Moreover, yes, there are plenty of unspoiled goodies in terms of plot turns, character beats and set-pieces. The movie hits the ground running with a 1993-set flashback set in a gothic “only in horror movies” mental hospital only to leap into an opening sequence which gets the trailers’ big horror pay-off beat (concerning Madison’s husband, played by Jake Abel, being attacked) out of the way.
