“Who are you, Gabriel?”
This might be a bit of a spoiler for the film, but I have a weird relationship with slasher movies. When I was a teen I loved them – I was happy to watch any of the Friday the 13ths, some of the Halloweens, the Massacres, the Sleepaway Camps, the Nightmares. If it featured co-eds getting murdered – preferably in gory ways – by a crazy killer with a crazy back-story? I was in. And then I somehow fell out of it. I guess I got bored. So bored that even post-modern meta-slashers like Scream really didn’t do much for me, at least the first time around. It got so that I’d go out of my way to avoid anything slasher adjacent for a good decade or so.
Even now I’m not sure what brought me back around. Maybe the release of the Friday the 13th remake in 2009? Not the film itself – despite enjoying the first 15 minutes or so, that film ended up disappointing me. Maybe that other 80’s slasher remake from the same year, My Bloody Valentine, which I loved, despite not really enjoying the original.
This is all a typically rambling way of saying that I’ve come to enjoy slasher flicks again, at least in limited doses. I don’t really go out of my way to watch them, but if something catches my eye or someone makes a recommendation, I’ll at least entertain the idea of watching it.
Which is why I’ve been meaning to watch Malignant for a while now. It’s been in my queue on various streaming services, and I think I’ve just re-added it every time it shifts to a new service – just waiting for that mood to strike. I’ve heard mixed things about it, which might have contributed to the delay. I’ve had some people tell me that they hated it, and others that it’s a misunderstood gem. I was also aware of James Wan as a filmmaker, but his work hadn’t really grabbed me before – I always enjoyed watching the films of his I managed to catch (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring and Aquaman), but didn’t really think about them much after.
For whatever the reason, I hadn’t been in the mood to watch Malignant. And then, finally, I was.
The Medium
I watched Malignant on Netflix. It’s also available on Max for subs and can be rented/purchased on AppleTV, Amazon Prime and Vudu. There is a Blu-ray and 4k from Warner Bros. and the film is shot well enough that I imagine the 4k is nice. There’s not much in the way of extras, however, and that’s too bad as I think this is the kind of film that might have fun with some behind the scenes featurettes and a commentary track.
The Movie
Malignant starts off with some psychic powers and graphic violence featuring a (mostly unseen) mental patient named Gabriel, who seems to also have some electrical control. Doctor Weaver (Jaqueline McKenzie), who has been trying to help Gabriel, has had enough and snarls something about “cutting out the cancer” before the opening credits crash in with some driving music and shots of a gory operation intercut with images from patient files. This is all kinda cool, in a horror video game sorta way, and I settle in for what I assume will be a big-budget “psychic killer” movie.
But then the rhythm of the film shifts, and we get the first (but not the last) sense of tonal whiplash. It’s modern day (the opening scenes are from 1993) and we see very pregnant Madison Mitchell (Annabelle Wallis) coming home from work to her restoration-in-progress house and her abusive husband, Derek (Jake Abel). Derek confronts Madison about her pregnancy and previous miscarriages, before he shoves her violently against the wall, causing a bloody head injury. She locks him out of the room. Later that night someone, or something, stalks Derek through the house and violently murders him, before attacking Madison, who is knocked unconscious.
This part of the film has a much slower pace, and even the violence is more gothic and spooky than the opening scenes. It’s well done, and Wallis in particular is believable as a wounded, fragile woman in a tragic situation, but it’s… weird. I started to think I was actually watching a haunted house movie. That we were going to have gothic trappings as the ghost of Gabriel haunted Madison, maybe even planning to be born again via her child.
When the film cuts to the cops we get that sense of whiplash again. The two lead detectives, Shaw (George Young) and Moss (Michole Briana White) and their CS Tech, Winnie (Ingrid Bisu) seem to be in yet another kind of film, a character-driven police procedural. Or maybe a horror comedy, given the banter and interpersonal stuff.
This continues to happen for the entire first half of the film. Any scenes with Madison and her sister Sydney (Maddie Hasson) are more grounded, more serious. Maybe because Wallis seems to be taking her role more seriously than anyone else, or maybe she’s just a better actress. Not that anyone’s bad, per se, but Wallis is putting in some gravitas that the others are missing. Those scenes will be followed by a chase scene or a gory kill or cop “banter.”
There’s lots of good, spooky stuff that happens during this part of the film. Cameras glide over the interior walls of a house as Madison runs from room to room, securing windows and doors. A tour guide in Seattle’s Underground is kidnapped and hidden away in a gothic attic. And Madison starts having horrible visions of the killer as he continues his murder spree. Those visions are particularly well done, with nice use of CGI to “melt” one reality into another and some inspired color choices that reminded me of 1970’s giallo films. It’s just hard to get your footing, tone wise. Sometimes it’s a spooky drama about a killer’s relationship to the victim (Madison, it turns out, is adopted), and sometimes it’s a slick and fun slasher movie with a psychic killer.
Eventually this all begins to blend, and the last third of the film drops any pretense of being a serious, grounded horror film and embraces the over-the-top, supernatural slasher it was always meant to be. You will think, about halfway through the film or so, that things have gotten about as crazy as they can, with psychic powers, a killer with electrical control and revelations about Madison’s connection to all the victims. They will get even more crazy. SO freakin’ crazy.
I think this is the point, with about 25 minutes left in the film, where some people decide to either rage quit or buy in. It’s either a complete departure from what you expected, and you end up frustrated and unhappy with the film as a whole, or it finally embraces the over-the-top elements that it’s only been playing with until now and becomes something you were secretly wanting it to be this whole time.
I ended up in the latter camp.
The crazy dial on this part of the film goes to 11, and if you’ve managed to weather all the tonal shifts up to this moment you may be okay with the final twist and the craziness that follows. If not, well, I totally understand – and I just wish Wan had embraced this madness from the beginning, rather than trying to blend elements that just don’t seem to gel. For me, however, the final 25 minutes turned the film from a well-made horror flick that, like his other films, I wouldn’t think about twice after it was over, into a crazy cult-classic that I wish had done better, financially. I want to see more of Madison, Sydney and especially Gabriel.
The Bottom Line
While Malignant doesn’t quite manage to mix all of its elements into a coherent whole, the journey is a fun one, with plenty of scares and grue and character to enjoy along the way, especially if you can ride out the tonal shifts. Really, though, it’s that last third of the film that elevates it into either a film you love or a film you hate. If Malignant had been made in the 1980’s instead of 2021 I think we’d be talking about Gabriel as one of the best supernatural slasher villains of all time, and wondering if we were getting a remake/reboot or just the seventh or eighth installment of the Malignant series.
