I was really worried about Malignant after the opening scene. It did not give me a good first impression. Bad acting, bizarre directing choices, and a soundtrack that doesn’t fit. This is a James Wan joint and he loves action and horror, so I settled in to see if he could turn this around. Aside from the soundtrack, the movie ended up winning me over.
After establishing that some kind of dangerous monster in a hospital is the big bad of the movie, we are introduced to Madison. She’s pregnant and her husband sucks. Some serious supernatural stuff happens to them in their home and we’re off to figure out what’s happening. Like many successful suspense/horror movies, Malignant hinges on deception and perspective to keep the audience on their toes. Madison keeps getting visions of people getting killed, with the monster soon directly contacting her. She doesn’t know what’s going on and her sanity is quickly questioned. But when it’s proven that her visions are actually happening in real life, she becomes a suspect. The unraveling of what’s happening–and whether you can trust Madison or not–is the best part of the movie and is done quite well. The last act of the movie is a lot of fun as all hell breaks loose.
Thankfully the bad acting goes away quickly. There’s nothing as ham-fisted and goofy in the actor’s line delivery after the opening scene. I like James Wan as a director. He’s not a fan of static camera placement and always looks for a way to move the camera around a scene in new and interesting ways. Usually, this works. In the opening quarter of the movie, there is a fantastic sequence of Madison running through her house in fear with the camera moving across the ceiling. It looks like you are looking down at a dollhouse with a live person inside of it, going from room to room and then up the stairs. As the walls fly by, sometimes those wipes are used for the camera to zoom closer or further away from her. It’s a really wild visual…I’m not too sure how it was accomplished.
Other times, the direction is heavy-handed, like in the first scene where the whole production looks like the movie was made in the early 2000s (what is with Madison and Sydney’s bangs? They must be terrible wigs. Drove me nuts). Really fast camera movement and editing that looks like it’s trying to be “Xtreme!” but looks more amateurish (a lot like how director Darren Lynn Bousman made his Saw movies look like a music video). One moment that sticks out to me is during the final action scene where someone fires a shotgun and it hits the desk instead of the target. A gigantic hole is made and the camera zooms in on it as the shot is fired. The sudden camera movement sticks out like a sore thumb because it’s distracting and not needed. You are behind the character with the gun, you see the muzzle flash, hear the loud boom, and see the gigantic hole in the desk. There’s no question of what’s happening in front of you, there’s no point in shoving it into the audience’s face. That action scene is fast and wild as it is, more is less in these situations.
The other negative is I never felt like the soundtrack ever fits the tone or theme of what I was watching. It’s a weird, lazy-sounding hybrid of metal and electronic music that more often felt like a distraction than an enhancement.
Back to the good stuff. The movie’s pacing is very good. The ratcheting of the stakes of what is happening and the peril that comes with it keeps the movie from getting stale. Every scene brings new information and the level of carnage is uncorked for the end. For an R rated horror movie, I thought they were pulling punches in the gore department at the start. I think they did so to get keep the mayhem for the last quarter of the movie.
The monster is also very inventive. It moves really weirdly and that’s always off-putting. That’s actually a curse and a blessing because at certain points the movement can make the monster look goofy. It’s so odd it can look funny and it makes you wonder why it’s moving the way it does. But the blessing side of that is you’re not too sure what you’re looking at or where it could have come from. That’s effective monster design and when you get the whole story, you get a great payoff. It’s a mean bugger too, so that’s always fun (the voice feels way too close to what the Scream franchise did though). The origin of the monster, how it comes out to hunt, and how it’s dealt with are all satisfying as well.
The special effects are really good as well. Very little comes off as cheap looking or too ‘off’, so it’s easy to suspend your disbelief and go with the flow. The melting and reforming room effect is a particular stand out.
For any seasoned horror fan, there’s nothing scary here. Scaredy cats will jump in fright a few times as there’s some spooky and grizzly stuff from start to finish. I like how the movie goes from suspense to ghost story, to body horror, and then action film pretty effortlessly. After the other horror movies James Wan has directed, I can see why this script caught his eye.
It’s about 105 minutes long, which is the perfect length for a Halloween treat.