M3GAN review: a hilarious horror-comedy worth of Chucky’s murder-doll legacy

It is home to some of the most boring and saddest horror movies in film history. It’s filled with hundreds of bad-taste parodies, laughless messes, silly garbage, and probably a few unfortunate movies that weren’t deliberately designed to be laughed at. It’s like watching the worst movie in this subgenre on a tightrope. They try to achieve balance between what they think are opposite ends, so the audience will laugh one minute and cry the next. However, this subgenre is following the lead of classics such as the Chucky movie. Child’s PlayGerard Johnstone, the director and his team are behind this new comedy about horror. M3GAN realize that laughing and screaming aren’t actually that different — and most importantly, that either one can be the key to a great time.

Written by MalignantAkela and James Cooper, screenwriters (director of Malignant, The Conjuring, The insidiousAnd Aquaman), M3GAN follows Cady (Violet McGraw), a young girl who recently lost both her parents in a car accident and now has to live with her married-to-her-career aunt, Gemma (For Girls Move Out’s Allison Williams). The seemingly good news for Cady is that Gemma is a roboticist at a high-tech toy company, and she is working on a new super-lifelike doll called M3GAN (Amie Donald) — short for Model 3 Generative Android — that’s programmed to be the best artificial friend a kid could have. Of course, if you’ve seen a trailer or even the poster, you probably know that M3GAN, like all sufficiently advanced AI (or any other newly developed technology in a horror movie), eventually takes things aLittleIt’s too far.

For fans of the murderous doll genre, parts of this plot may sound remarkably similar to 2019’s awful Child’s PlayThe reboot subbed out Chucky voice actor Brad Dourif for Mark Hamill. The series lost all its charm over the past four decades. Child’s Play, and replaced the story of the serial-killer-possessed doll with one about AI run amok.

Universal Pictures

There are many similarities between them, however. M3GAN Avoids the same pitfalls as the old Child’s Play. The movie attempted to play on irony and bad meta-jokes, M3GAN We err on the side of the original’s brilliant tone Child’s Play, with perfectly straight-faced meanness that’s so absurd, it always tips into comedy at exactly the right moments.

M3GANLike most horror movies or Chucky, he was created with an understanding of audience comprehension in mind. They’re playing a game with you. These movies never let you know when it’s OK to laugh. The movies don’t pause for punchlines like traditional comedy, but rather play the most brutal gags in a straight line. They throw in joke after darkly comic joke, daring viewers to laugh in spite of themselves, forcing a buildup of tension that eventually resolves in cathartic giggles at the weirdest, most uncomfortable moments — like M3GAN’s truly hilarious sequence where the killer doll sings to Cady, turning a familiar pop hit into an unexpected bedtime song.

The movies help the viewer arrive at the right conclusion. Anxiously awaiting the next safe moment to laugh, to relieve the comedic pressure, isn’t much different from waiting for a dreaded jump scare when a movie is foreshadowing a threat ahead. Laughing and screaming aren’t opposites; they’re the exact same release valve, turned in different directions. If you use them both enough and with the appropriate intensity and cadence, filmmakers can get audiences to forget about their differences and simply enjoy the journey.

Perhaps this is the key to winning. M3GAN plays best. As with many of Sam Raimi’s best movies, from Evil Dead 2To Drag me to HellEach moment. M3GAN It is endearingly funny and also sneeringly mean which gives it its power.

Universal Pictures

It is far from being confined by the narrow concept of an too-smart doll going rogue. M3GAN The company uses the most dramatic and authentic moments to make comedy as well as its ridiculous murders. Cooper, Wan, and Johnstone want us to laugh uncomfortably at the inept cruelty of Gemma snatching a toy away from the grieving Cady because “it’s a collectible!” just as much as we laugh at the objectively silly terror of M3GAN dropping down to all fours to hunt down a vicious bully. After all, if we’re watching a movie to laugh at something awful, why should murder draw a hard line about how far dark comedy can go?

M3GAN’s perfectly played-straight tone takes a while to settle in, not because the movie doesn’t start off on the right foot (it does), but because it’s almost jarring to see Johnstone display so much confidence in his own unique tone. His movie never offers even a tiny smirk or a hint of irony to let us know it’s in on the joke, because that would break its wonderful spell. Instead, from its very first moments, it straps viewers in for its special blend of sincerely hilarious meanness, as if Johnstone is positive you’ll settle in eventually. Every moment becomes a joy once the dam is broken.

For this reason, it’s hard to judge whether M3GAN is ever actually scary, in large part because Johnstone and the writers don’t seem interested in anything so one-note. The action picks up speed and M3GAN is in full swing. starts her most unhinged rampage, the movie’s particular rhythm has made nearly everything happening on screen hilarious, no matter how heinous it gets. That’s exactly the mark of a truly great horror comedy. Charles Lee Ray would be proud.

M3GANOn Jan. 6, the movie debuts at theaters