Her hate is real. She is not.
For the U.S. film industry to have produced a knockoff of Child's Play retooled to make the observation, "huh, did you know that there are dolls connected to the internet these days? What won't they think of next" that is actually a good and watchable movie counts as a small miracle. For it to have produced two such knockoffs, one of them given the January Horror Movie Death Slot where you only put the absolute worst of the worst dregs of a genre not prone to a high tradition of quality, means that we are no living through the signs and portents of the End Times. But here we are, and while I'm probably being a touch snippy in referring to the 2019 Child's Play as a "knockoff" of the 1988 Child's Play, given that it's a full and official remake and all, there's no other way to refer to M3GAN: it's a little dismissive to say that it's "what if Chucky was a girl's toy and was also designed as a girl", but it is also 100% accurate.
And despite that somewhat threadbare high concept, and being dropped into theaters on the literal worst day of the year to release a genre film that you think is even a little bit good, M3GAN turns out to be an entirely worthwhile thing to watch, and almost certainly the best "first big movie of the new year" to come out since before I became a film critic. It's the first-ever collaboration between the production companies Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, two of the three most important horror movie brands currently working in North America (A24 is the other one), and to a certain extent you can see both of their fingerprints on it, though it's got a bit more Atomic Monster in its DNA: the story is credited to Akela Cooper & James Wan, with Cooper writing the screenplay solo, mostly the same arrangement that was responsible for 2021's Malignant (which was directed by Wan; he's one of four producers here, along with Blumhouse's own Jason Blum). It's nowhere close to the marvel of nutsoid horror that was, though it does have its moments of zaniness that help to blur the line between thrilling and silly without actually cheapening either of those modes. That is to say, M3GAN has already been anointed (mostly by people ready to do the anointing before they had actually watched it, if we are being perhaps slightly too cynical) as some kind of self-aware campy trashterpiece, but it's still at least thinking about being suspenseful, and when it can't entirely manage that, uncanny.
It's also, more surprising than either of the above kind of smart: it's a story about people who aren't emotionally equipped to be parents refusing to admit that fact to the general ruination of themselves and others, and a story about how we have gotten much too good as a culture about using technological bullshit to keep children distracted, at an uncertain cost to their development as psychological beings. The film opens with a pair of prologues, one snarky and one not: the snarky one introduces the theme of "what are we doing to children's toys?" perfectly, in the form of an add for some kind of allegedly crazy-advanced toy that can be succinctly and completely described as Furbies that you control with an iPad. It's a sign of how much the filmmakers, starting with director Gerard Johnstone, actually believe that we're capable of independent though that the word "Furby" is never spoken, allowing us to tease out for ourselves that this ballyhooed advance is basically just something that was already stupid being given a cumbersome Internet of Things facelift for no reason other than because executives like technology. The second prologue plunges us right into chaos and tension, as a family skiing trip goes horribly wrong when the snow picks up and the entire space around the car becomes a solid white hell of diffuse light, right up until a snowplow smashes right at the camera. RIP Mom and Dad, and now little orphan Cady (Violet McGraw) ends up with her mom's sister, Aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), who just so happens to be the tech genius responsible for those dopey Furby rip-offs. Her boss has been leaning on her hard for that toy's next generation, but Gemma has her own project she's been working on: a child-sized autonomous A.I. robot she calls "Model 3 Generative Android" - M3GAN for short (I am a little surprised they didn't go with M3GAn, lowercase-N, but maybe that felt too 2000s). And having a sad little girl on her hands makes Gemma extremely happy, because now she has a perfect opportunity to both test out the M3GAN while also offloading her extremely unwelcome new job as the caretaker for a human child.
If that sounds a little harsh, great news: it should! M3GAN caught me completely off-balance by actually allowing Gemma to come across as a slightly horrible person with lots of room to grow, one of those simple things that ought to just be standard issue in movies, but frequently end up feeling like an afterthought. In fact, my only substantive nitpick, assuming we're going to spot the film "the world's most advanced A.I. system is being developed at a toy company and marketed as a luxury object", is that I couldn't believe for five seconds that Gemma would actually want to take Cady, especially with the writers briefly feinting towards a plotline wherein Cady's paternal grandparents have made the offer to let her live there. But that's not really the point, it's just the pretext, which is to get us to the point where, in her twinned excitement at A) getting to test out her new creation, and B) getting to use gimmicky technology to "cure" Cady of the sorrow of losing her parents, Gemma forgets to program M3GAN with foolproof killswitches, or the Three Laws of Robotics, and instead gives her a generic "protect Cady from absolutely everything that might inconvenience her" command, as well as an inexplicably powerful titanium body. All of which means that when the robot inevitably decides that her first priority should be murdering people, it will be awfully tough to stop her.
It's all a little obvious and a little contrived, but it works. M3GAN herself is a terrific movie monster, played in the synthetic flesh by Amie Donald, who has been given one layer of plastic unreality by the hair and make-up department, and then another by a light coat of CGI (largely in the form of some unpleasant anime eyes), to come across as unnervingly smooth in both her body and her movements, and then her voice is provided by Jenna Davis, a syrupy singsong that reeks of tinny insincerity when she's being "friendly" and provides a predictable but satisfying counterpoint when she's saying horrible, violent things later on. Much has been made about the ridiculous shit at the end, when M3GAN goes full-on killbot, but I frankly thought that was the least interesting part of the movie: the part where the combined work of Donald, Davis, and the effects all combine to make a killer doll who is impressively good at seeming like an actual perversion of the correct moral order of the world, while also being kind of goofily unthreatening in the way of all killer dolls. Plus, Williams and McGraw are great at playing a the gulf in between their characters, enough that M3GAN would be a solid story of unmet emotional needs even in the absence of a murderous android heightening the disconnect between the two characters.
It's all quite watchable and fun, though also pretty shallow: Johnstone's direction is more competent than distinctive, and there's only one scene in the movie with any actual stylistic personality (a thriller sequence as two of Gemma's assistants try to disconnect M3GAN while running diagnostics on her). The film was shot for an R-rating and only downgraded to PG-13 that they'd be able to market it hard to teenagers, and while the cut itself is clean, that lack of blood really makes itself felt in the general weightlessness of everything once M3GAN starts to go evil: it's a film that is fixated strictly on "haha, wouldn't it be ridiculous if..." at the persistent expense of having any stakes, though fortunately the aunt/niece conflict manages to shape enough of the film that it still feels like an actual story. I see no modern classic here, in other words, and I suspect that the sequels that went into development the exact microsecond that the shape of the film's box office run became clear are going to run out of gas pretty hard. All that being said, it's a fun time, it's a little eerie, and it got me invested in seeing the fraught relationship between its thorny characters get patched up, and for a January horror film, that basically puts this on par with the collected works of Shakespeare.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
And despite that somewhat threadbare high concept, and being dropped into theaters on the literal worst day of the year to release a genre film that you think is even a little bit good, M3GAN turns out to be an entirely worthwhile thing to watch, and almost certainly the best "first big movie of the new year" to come out since before I became a film critic. It's the first-ever collaboration between the production companies Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, two of the three most important horror movie brands currently working in North America (A24 is the other one), and to a certain extent you can see both of their fingerprints on it, though it's got a bit more Atomic Monster in its DNA: the story is credited to Akela Cooper & James Wan, with Cooper writing the screenplay solo, mostly the same arrangement that was responsible for 2021's Malignant (which was directed by Wan; he's one of four producers here, along with Blumhouse's own Jason Blum). It's nowhere close to the marvel of nutsoid horror that was, though it does have its moments of zaniness that help to blur the line between thrilling and silly without actually cheapening either of those modes. That is to say, M3GAN has already been anointed (mostly by people ready to do the anointing before they had actually watched it, if we are being perhaps slightly too cynical) as some kind of self-aware campy trashterpiece, but it's still at least thinking about being suspenseful, and when it can't entirely manage that, uncanny.
It's also, more surprising than either of the above kind of smart: it's a story about people who aren't emotionally equipped to be parents refusing to admit that fact to the general ruination of themselves and others, and a story about how we have gotten much too good as a culture about using technological bullshit to keep children distracted, at an uncertain cost to their development as psychological beings. The film opens with a pair of prologues, one snarky and one not: the snarky one introduces the theme of "what are we doing to children's toys?" perfectly, in the form of an add for some kind of allegedly crazy-advanced toy that can be succinctly and completely described as Furbies that you control with an iPad. It's a sign of how much the filmmakers, starting with director Gerard Johnstone, actually believe that we're capable of independent though that the word "Furby" is never spoken, allowing us to tease out for ourselves that this ballyhooed advance is basically just something that was already stupid being given a cumbersome Internet of Things facelift for no reason other than because executives like technology. The second prologue plunges us right into chaos and tension, as a family skiing trip goes horribly wrong when the snow picks up and the entire space around the car becomes a solid white hell of diffuse light, right up until a snowplow smashes right at the camera. RIP Mom and Dad, and now little orphan Cady (Violet McGraw) ends up with her mom's sister, Aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), who just so happens to be the tech genius responsible for those dopey Furby rip-offs. Her boss has been leaning on her hard for that toy's next generation, but Gemma has her own project she's been working on: a child-sized autonomous A.I. robot she calls "Model 3 Generative Android" - M3GAN for short (I am a little surprised they didn't go with M3GAn, lowercase-N, but maybe that felt too 2000s). And having a sad little girl on her hands makes Gemma extremely happy, because now she has a perfect opportunity to both test out the M3GAN while also offloading her extremely unwelcome new job as the caretaker for a human child.
If that sounds a little harsh, great news: it should! M3GAN caught me completely off-balance by actually allowing Gemma to come across as a slightly horrible person with lots of room to grow, one of those simple things that ought to just be standard issue in movies, but frequently end up feeling like an afterthought. In fact, my only substantive nitpick, assuming we're going to spot the film "the world's most advanced A.I. system is being developed at a toy company and marketed as a luxury object", is that I couldn't believe for five seconds that Gemma would actually want to take Cady, especially with the writers briefly feinting towards a plotline wherein Cady's paternal grandparents have made the offer to let her live there. But that's not really the point, it's just the pretext, which is to get us to the point where, in her twinned excitement at A) getting to test out her new creation, and B) getting to use gimmicky technology to "cure" Cady of the sorrow of losing her parents, Gemma forgets to program M3GAN with foolproof killswitches, or the Three Laws of Robotics, and instead gives her a generic "protect Cady from absolutely everything that might inconvenience her" command, as well as an inexplicably powerful titanium body. All of which means that when the robot inevitably decides that her first priority should be murdering people, it will be awfully tough to stop her.
It's all a little obvious and a little contrived, but it works. M3GAN herself is a terrific movie monster, played in the synthetic flesh by Amie Donald, who has been given one layer of plastic unreality by the hair and make-up department, and then another by a light coat of CGI (largely in the form of some unpleasant anime eyes), to come across as unnervingly smooth in both her body and her movements, and then her voice is provided by Jenna Davis, a syrupy singsong that reeks of tinny insincerity when she's being "friendly" and provides a predictable but satisfying counterpoint when she's saying horrible, violent things later on. Much has been made about the ridiculous shit at the end, when M3GAN goes full-on killbot, but I frankly thought that was the least interesting part of the movie: the part where the combined work of Donald, Davis, and the effects all combine to make a killer doll who is impressively good at seeming like an actual perversion of the correct moral order of the world, while also being kind of goofily unthreatening in the way of all killer dolls. Plus, Williams and McGraw are great at playing a the gulf in between their characters, enough that M3GAN would be a solid story of unmet emotional needs even in the absence of a murderous android heightening the disconnect between the two characters.
It's all quite watchable and fun, though also pretty shallow: Johnstone's direction is more competent than distinctive, and there's only one scene in the movie with any actual stylistic personality (a thriller sequence as two of Gemma's assistants try to disconnect M3GAN while running diagnostics on her). The film was shot for an R-rating and only downgraded to PG-13 that they'd be able to market it hard to teenagers, and while the cut itself is clean, that lack of blood really makes itself felt in the general weightlessness of everything once M3GAN starts to go evil: it's a film that is fixated strictly on "haha, wouldn't it be ridiculous if..." at the persistent expense of having any stakes, though fortunately the aunt/niece conflict manages to shape enough of the film that it still feels like an actual story. I see no modern classic here, in other words, and I suspect that the sequels that went into development the exact microsecond that the shape of the film's box office run became clear are going to run out of gas pretty hard. All that being said, it's a fun time, it's a little eerie, and it got me invested in seeing the fraught relationship between its thorny characters get patched up, and for a January horror film, that basically puts this on par with the collected works of Shakespeare.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Categories: domestic dramas, horror, science fiction, thrillers
