Review: Malignant

Annabelle Wallis gets beaten up yet again by her douchebag husband (Jake Abel) and miscarries. Now she’s somehow seeing visions of horrific killings – including that of her husband - by a shadowy figure. Wallis and her sister Maddie Hasson (who is also seeing these visions) suspect this is a figure from their past long believed to be dead. Jacqueline McKenzie plays a doctor from an asylum who knew Wallis as a child.

 

Outside of “Insidious”, I get the feeling I’m just not a James Wan (“Saw”, “The Conjuring”) kinda guy. This 2021 horror film is seemingly pretty popular in horror circles, and is as well-shot and well-lit as you’d expect from a Wan film. The camerawork in particular is dynamic in a wannabe Argento way. Sadly, the film itself is tedious, slow-moving, often silly, and really messy. Slow-moving jump scare movies ain’t my horror bag. If we were given a more charismatic or interesting lead actress than Annabelle Wallis this might’ve had half a chance even with all the lazy jump scares. Unfortunately, we’ve got what we’ve got and I was mostly bored.

 

The cast is pretty underwhelming for the most part. Annabelle Wallis is vanilla wallpaper with exaggerated soap opera facial expressions sprinkled on top, and the actors playing the cops (George Young and Michole Briana White) are two of the worst actors I’ve seen in a film that’s already got Annabelle Wallis. Wan is not a good director of actors at all, in “Saw” he helped Danny Glover give the worst performance of his career, and here veteran Aussie actress Jacqui McKenzie is either condescending to the material or has forgotten how to act at all. The one person who manages to escape Wan’s mishandling of actors by sheer force of personality is an actress named Maddie Hasson, who should’ve been the lead. She’s got something.

 

Once again director Wan shows he’s seen lots of horror films but doesn’t seem to have learned a lot of useful things in watching them. He isn’t very consistent in making good horror films of his own, at least not ones that I identify as being good. “Saw” was an OK first try (Darren Lynn Bousman’s “Saw II” is the only good film in the series), “Insidious” and “Insidious Chapter 2” were solid modern versions of “The Changeling” and remain Wan’s best works. That’s about it in my view, and this film may have the greatest division of ambition and success of any Wan film thus far. By the time this one gets wild – and it sure does – I had long stopped caring. It would’ve been a fun finale if I had cared about what came before it. The first 25 minutes are especially a chore in this.

 

A messy, boring horror outing with elements of Bava, Argento, Cronenberg, and particularly J-horror – a subgenre I’ve never cared for. The mixture is pretty uninvolving, with a dreadfully uninteresting lead actress providing an anchor of the wrong kind. Wallis takes this one with her to the bottom of the cinematic ocean. Director Wan has definitely seen “Ju-on: The Grudge” (one of the better J-horrors), “Opera”, “Inferno”, and Bava’s “The Evil Eye”. Good for him so have I, and I’d rather be re-watching any of those instead of this dreary mess. You’ve heard of style over substance, this is the empty aping of someone else’s style, boring substance, and predictable ‘scares’. Not my thing, it may work better for you. The screenplay is by Akela Cooper (who co-wrote the overrated “M3GAN” with Wan), from a story by Wan, Cooper, and Ingrid Bisu, the latter having an on-screen role in the film as a crime scene technician.

 

Rating: D+

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