M3GAN review: Hello, dolly
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
There she was all winter, the demented demon doll body-ody-odying through our dreams and our social feeds, a fitting meme for these times. That M3GAN (in theaters this Friday) is also actually a movie feels almost like an afterthought; what further proof of concept can 100 minutes at a multiplex bring that the fruit-fly loops of TikTok failed to supply? Nothing, really, though Gerard Johnstone's horror comedy — hard emphasis on the second word — sustains the joke surprisingly well for most of its runtime: a scampering Blumhouse caper that turns out to be blithely self-aware, negligibly jump-scary, and mostly very fun.
Allison Williams, extending her niche as the unflappable final-girl muse of thrillers like Get Out and The Perfection, is Gemma, apparently a minor genius when it comes to robotics. She works for a sleek toy company somewhere near Seattle, churning out Furby-like moppets called Purrfect Petz for the masses — though her passion project is a lifelike AI she's christened M3GAN (or if you don't go in for kicky acronyms, Model 3 Generative Android). When her sister and brother-in-law are killed in a snowy car accident in the opening scenes, she also becomes guardian to her nine-year-old niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). But who has time to parent a grieving child when production deadlines loom?
Geoffrey Short/Universal Pictures
Her cocksure boss (Ronny Chieng) is on her back, demanding a cheaper model of Petz to undercut the company's competitors. What he gets instead is M3GAN, a remarkably lifelike little girl designed to serve as a companion and best friend to whoever can afford her. He's concerned at first about cost — "More or less than a Tesla?" — but sufficiently seduced by the possibilities and the pinwheel dollar signs in his eyes to give it a green light.
And what better beta tester could there be for this small miracle of bio-technology than Gemma's own traumatized niece? M3GAN bonds with her young charge immediately, as she's explicitly designed to do; an emotional support animal forged from wigs, silicone, and ones and zeroes. She reads bedtime stories in every character's voice, provides motherly bathroom discipline, and seems to have an endless supply of Wikipedia fun facts.
She is also, it turns out, unfailingly loyal, less like a lap dog than a four-foot mafioso. And when various outsiders interfere — a meddling neighbor, a nasty classmate, any misguided human who attempts to hit her power switch — M3GAN's reflex response is homicide. It's entertaining, and not particularly bloody, to watch her cut a swath (sometimes literally) through various set pieces and soft tissues, preening and dropping pithy one-liners with as much hair-flipping malevolence as any star of Selling Sunset.
Director Johnstone, a native New Zealander, moves breezily through Akela Cooper's smartly streamlined screenplay (the story is by nouveau horror god James Wan), often turning his cameras away from the gore we're braced for and moving on briskly to the next scene. The Doll Designed by Satan is hardly a new concept even for Wan, the man who gave us several Annabelles, and the narrative arc, too, is almost comfortingly familiar: You know who's marked for death as soon as they walk on screen (rest in pieces, bully boy).
But the tart in-jokes and absurdities of the script, its winky acknowledgments of all the tropes gone before it, feel like a delirious cap on recent genre hits like Barbarian and Malignant. This is not the morose, carnage-soaked horror of dank basements and clammy night terrors; most of the movie happens in bright daylight, every maniacal head tilt, ungodly hip swivel, and murder-by-gardening-tool calibrated for screams that end not with a gasp but a giggle. M3GAN came to play, and possibly reboot her motherboard for a sequel. Are you not entertained? Grade: B+
Related content:
