M3GAN is a bit of sugar, spice and stab you twice. Housebound director Gerard Johnstone is no stranger to melding horror with humor despite his sparse filmography. And it’s not like the rogue AI is anything new, either. Between HAL 9000, Agent Smith or (my personal favorite) AM, it’s hard for a hostile ghost in the machine to get a circuit in edgewise. M3GAN doesn’t try to break new ground as much as it flosses all over it.
Violet McGraw (The Haunting of Hill House) plays Cady, a tween whose parents die in a tragic snowplow accident. She’s placed with her aunt, Gemma, played by Allison Williams (Get Out). Gemma’s career is built on AI, robotics and toys that can shit themselves. Unfortunately, the well begins to run dry as her CEO fears their company’s competitors — who announce a cheap knockoff with a reactive LED butt — will overtake the Tamagotchi-Furby monster market.
Her grieving niece and an unrealistic deadline pushes Gemma to complete M3GAN, an almost-lifelike doll portrayed in body by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis. M3GAN’s prime directive becomes protecting Cady’s physical and emotional well-being. The toy takes a few liberties — and heads — to ensure her purpose.
M3GAN is everything Lars Klevberg’s abysmal Child’s Play remake tried to be. It asks us to consider how we exploit grief and enable tech dependency without a heavy-handed, dogmatic message. Tech is comfort, and the film slices through how emotionally vulnerable it can make us with a sentiment akin to Spike Jonze’s Her. Granted, it’s not nearly as good as Her, but it ditches alarmist copouts to deliver something simple and telling.
This is also not much of a horror film. While you’ll see clear opportunities for M3GAN to be more unnerving and terrifying, the restraint is honestly appreciated. (After all, M3GAN’s eyes are unsettling enough; is there really a need to pile onto that?) Instead, it opens the door for humor. And it takes advantage of this with a surprising amount of tact.
M3GAN has a near-perfect balance of dark revelations and clever comedy. The story would fit snuggly within Black Mirror’s first and second season — you know, when the series was still pretty good. That’s not to say every joke lands, but it’s very hard to deny its wit by the time M3GAN converts Sia’s “Titanium” into a lullaby.
Unfortunately, M3GAN hits so many things right, its few weaknesses are as jarring as a Tickle Me Elmo with dying batteries. For one, in the era of Siri and Alexa, it feels outdated to lean on cheap tricks like overt voice digitization to remind us something is artificial. It wasn’t needed in Ex Machina, and it’s definitely not needed to sell M3GAN’s malice.
Second, she’s already menacing, and the implication she can cease control of electronics and infiltrate vast defense networks makes her more so. It’s just hard not to yearn for a little bit more storytelling to that end. It’s a stretch to suspect the full extent of her Wi-Fi enabled powers will probably be saved for a sequel. But that’s the double-edged sword of an emerging horror villain: You want so much of them before they’re spoiled by a half-baked franchise.
Ultimately, there’s no guarantee M3GAN will get a sequel at all. The character definitely deserves it, but if this is truly all the time we get with her, we’d be wise to cherish it. M3GAN isn’t the brand-new caboose to an ever-growing hype train. This diamond-studded droid does, in fact, slay. —Daniel Bokemper