Review: Malignant (2021)

Malignant (2021)

Rated R for strong horror violence and for gruesome images, and for language

Score: 4 out of 5

Malignant is... a trip. At first glance, James Wan’s latest is a supernatural horror film of the sort that he’s done more than once before with Insidious and The Conjuring, albeit with a dash of vintage giallo, a film about a young woman whose abusive husband is killed by a malicious spirit who now seems to be stalking her. Under the surface, however, there are hints of something else going on, especially an opening scene implying an explanation that leans more towards science (or at least science fiction) than the occult. And then... then it hits. An explosive genre shift that reminds you, oh yeah, Wan also directed the Aquaman movie and Furious 7, combining his experience in both action and horror to deliver a third act that has to be seen to be believed. It’s a movie where narrative cohesion is shaky, the “science” can be laughed right out of the room even at first glance, and where your enjoyment will be determined by your tolerance for crazy-ass shit. But if you’re down with all that, you’re down.

The first thing that impressed me here was that Wan managed to accomplish something I’d never seen before: he got a good performance out of Annabelle Wallis. Playing the film’s protagonist Madison here, Wallis is an actor who I’d thought little of before this, being distinctly unimpressed with her as the lead in Annabelle and feeling that she faded into the background in the 2017 reboot of The Mummy. It appears that changing up her look and swapping her blonde waves for frumpy brunette bangs was just the transformation she needed to play this film’s protagonist, whose life spirals off the rails as she shares what seems to be a psychic link to Gabriel, the evil spirit who forces her to watch as he murders a slew of people who are all connected to something in Madison’s past. Wallis was good enough playing Madison in the first half of the film as your normal haunted heroine, a timid young widow who trembles in fear of Gabriel, but as the film goes on and the events start to involve Madison directly, Wallis is forced to step up accordingly. Let’s just say, I was telling my friends as I watched this that I unironically wanted to see her star in an action movie, as meek little Madison suddenly turned genuinely intimidating in ways that I won’t dare spoil. (I’m specifically thinking a remake of The Long Kiss Goodnight.)

Wan himself too deserves a lot of the credit for this movie feel as balls-out as it did. As noted, he was homaging giallo movies here, starting with Gabriel, a villain who feels like a combination of the awkwardly-moving contortionist ghosts of modern supernatural horror with a retro killer in a black trench coat and leather gloves. Gabriel was an absolute monster in this film, a creature of destruction whose abilities defy any logical explanation beyond “fuck you, it’s awesome and scary as hell to think about”, and sometimes, that’s all the explanation I really need. Does anything about Gabriel make a lick of scientific and medical sense? Hell no. I bet I’d have the time of my life sitting down and watching this movie alongside an actual doctor, like how NASA has new recruits watch Armageddon and then tests them on all the times it makes a mockery of science. But I’ll tell you, I was not thinking about the mechanics of how Gabriel was supposed to “work” when I was watching him annihilate scores of people who are just now learning the hard way that he’s not trapped with them, they’re trapped with him. I already had bits of that scene spoiled for me going in, but I still wasn’t prepared to see it in full, and in context. This movie was Wan deciding to bring his entire bag of tricks to play, from both the horror movies he started out with and the action blockbusters he graduated to.

You’ll notice here that I haven’t really done my normal, paragraph-long detailed plot summary, and that’s because this is not a movie where plot is of paramount concern. Plot twists, now, those most certainly are. This is a winding, twisting movie full of shocking reveals where characters, especially Madison and those close to her, are not who we thought they were, and where the massive, imposing edifices of abandoned orphanages and hospitals hold all manner of dark secrets buried in their dusty archives. It’s here where the giallo homage really comes out in both Wan’s direction and Akela Cooper’s writing, and I wouldn’t call it the film’s strongest suit. There’s a lot that the film has to hand-wave in order for it to make sense, above all else Madison’s role in the story and various scientific concepts, and even then, you can’t quite be sure how much of what we and Madison see actually happened. This is not a movie that wants you to sit down and think about it all that much afterwards; it wants you to buckle up and get ready for a hell of a ride.

The Bottom Line

Malignant is a movie that, with its mix of bloody horror, action, and weird science, suggests to me that James Wan should’ve been given the reins of the rebooted Resident Evil movies. It’s already proven to be a fiercely divisive movie even in my friend circle, but for my money, it’s a cult classic in the making.