What? I do watch recent movies, you know.
I was told I needed to go into Malignant cold, with as little knowledge as possible. That the plot started out batshit and only got more batshit from there. Now, I like James Wan as a horror director (and I absolutely loved his Aquaman), so I saw it before it could get spoiled for me. So I’m going to take the same tack in writing about it, trying to not give away too much, which is going to look absolutely quaint in a week or so when everybody knows everything about it.
First we have Madison (Annabelle Wallis), a troubled woman who is having a stretch of bad life; she’s pregnant again after three miscarriages, and her husband is an abusive asshole (Jake Abel doing a too-good job in the role). An argument culminates in him smashing her head into a drywall, apologizing copiously and running to get some ice. Madison, bleeding from the back of her head, locks the bedroom door behind him and collapses onto the bed.
That night, somebody comes into the house and murders the husband, leaving his body a twisted wreck. Madison discovers his body the next morning, and if you watch any true crime shows, you know she is instantly the prime suspect, although she doesn’t remember much from the previous night, just a dream about a mysterious black-clad figure doing the killing.
Of course, since we have a movie to fill, there will be more murders, and each time Madison finds herself paralyzed as she has a vision of the murder happening. The murders are connected to something in Madison’s past, and, as is traditional, Madison’s sister Sydney (Maddie Hanson) proves a better detective about this past connection than the cops assigned to her case (George Young and Michole Briana White).
There’s a nice little horror show prologue that gives you an important clue to the nature of this mysterious assassin (and more clues are even dropped in the opening credit), so although horror movie aficionados will be fairly certain that they know what’s going on, the actual mechanism and nature of the killer has to be unfolded throughout the story, and that’s where the fun lies – at least for me. And the movie certainly doesn’t lack for mayhem and action.
I will tell you the killer’s name is Gabriel (the trailer does that, anyway), and that I’ve seen it mentioned online that he should be the star of a new franchise, and I say naaaaaah to that. He’s an interesting character, truly bizarre to watch in motion, owing more to the Crooked Man in Wan’s Conjuring 2 than anything else; completely disturbing to the human eye. But not everything is franchise fodder, for the love of God. The Crooked Man is already getting his own movie, you should let Malignant be what it is: a decent giallo-adjacent horror movie that would be all the better for being a one-and-done.
Less than 500 words. And there is why I don’t usually do recent movies.
drfreex.com 