M3GAN | Check out the horror movie review

Hollywood has been trying to achieve this for almost half a decade m3gan the difference is that on the first try she was called Chucky. the reissue of killer toy was launched in 2019, with Markus Hamill a new version of the doll that has been terrorizing the cinema (and more recently television) screens since the late 1980s. What was new about this remake, at least as it was being sold by the studio, was that Chucky from the new Killer Toy would be a technological doll full of farfetched features that would allow the franchise to confront the fears and anxieties of parents and children alike of the internet generation.

It turns out that as a narrative, the Chucky franchise was never very interested in such things. As created and guided by Don Mancini, the Child’s Play saga historically speaks much more about excluded and oppressed individuals from society and about their interactions with the hegemonic system see the 2nd season of the series, which is largely set in a monastery. Subverting expectations of suddenly talking to audiences about the child industrial complex and its perverse relationships with today’s “chronically online” generation just didn’t work because there was too much baggage with that name and that character.

M3gan’s first tour de force, therefore, is to position itself as an original story a new product, in the promotional language used and abused by the film itself. The screenwriters take advantage of the fact that horror is one of the last genres in which Hollywood still dares to finance films independently of large franchises Akela Cooper and James Wan (partnership founded in excellent Maligno) brought M3gan to the proverbial pinnacle of scary stories trying to sum up the fears and dilemmas of their time as they tend to be that good.

And understand this: M3gan doesn’t have to be particularly original (which it isn’t) to establish this position. In the age of remakes, reboots, spinoffs and shared universes, it just needs to look fresh and without much effort. In the plot, little Cady (Violet McGrawwho was young Nell in Haunted Hill House) loses her parents in a car accident and ends up moving in with her Aunt Gemma (Alison Williams), an unfriendly engineer working for a multinational toy company.

Faced with the difficulties of becoming her niece’s guardian, Gemma does the only thing she can: create a new toy, the android doll M3gan, programmed to tutor and protect Cady in all situations. The idea is to subvert primal fears caused by both the idea of ​​toys coming to life and the concept of artificial intelligence turning against their creators. In the first realm, M3gan’s silicone face is often reminiscent of Chucky’s, especially when distorted into perverted expressions not necessarily associated with play and childhood imaginations.

The director Gerald Johnstone, whose only previous feature was the littleseen (but praised) horror Housebound, knows how to balance those moments. He finds valuable allies in the young actresses hired to play the puppet (friend Donald the body was double while Jenna Davis provided the voice of M3gan), using his sudden animalistic movements efficiently to disrupt the normality of the home and business environments in which the story takes place. Next to the cameraman Peter McCaffreyhe still inserts welcome visual games (paying attention to specific moments when the puppet is “disassembled” by the camera, leaving only parts of her body visible) amid a more direct, less formalistic approach to production.

On the other hand, M3gan’s “awakening” as an artificial intelligence is less Ex Machina or Age of Ultron and more Black Mirror, exploring how identities constructed on pop culture extrapolations in internet structures do not carry the weight of realworld complexity and even out for this reason, they often provoke violent reactions to it. Not that the puppet is a cipher to the world’s incels and blackpillers, but it’s clear that the immature error she falls into trying to “protect” Cady comes from her purely artificial, statistical, algorithmic experience the world comes from.

No wonder the film pauses no fewer than three times for M3gan to sing some pop hit that speaks of overcoming or optimism in his autotune robotized voice. M3gan, the film, would never underestimate the power of poper narrative, its ability to mobilize our thinking and emotions in a given cultural context — but it certainly says it screams a melodyshrouded declaration of defiance (let’s say, “Titan “, from sia) is not enough to overcome a personal tragedy. In doing so, of course, he takes advantage of the fact that his villain is literally made of titanium to add to the joke.

This ability to play both sides of the board incorporating nods to traditional horror and “memorable” moments, reviving and modernizing traditional camps, persifying the instrumentalization of the child as a consumer, without losing sight of the fact that the goal of the Spotts must be Be the Adult that makes M3gan a simply perfect piece of pop cinema. Like any culturally relevant horror film, it’s smart from a marketing standpoint (the hook for the sequel is obvious, and so there’s a strategic containment of what’s shown in that first film) as well as being clever narratively from a standpoint. .

Time will be kind to M3gan, but even we as audiences and critics can choose to understand his genius at first sight. It seems a lot fairer, doesn’t it?