Malignant (2021)
A murder mystery with absolutely no intention of behaving.
Directed by James Wan · 111 minutes
Source-based draft ready for editorial review. Critical readings, verdict and advisories are proposed.
A James Wan film about a woman witnessing murders could have been another exercise in haunted-house procedure. Malignant keeps finding reasons to become something much stranger. Its appeal depends on how much pleasure you take in a film that commits to a ludicrous idea with expensive, elaborate conviction.
The useful question is how well that conviction carries the film. Calling it ridiculous is an observation about the premise. It still needs to earn the time spent reaching its biggest surprises.
Before you watch
Contains graphic bloody violence, surgical imagery, an assault on a pregnant woman, pregnancy loss and a verbal reference to rape. The domestic abuse is serious material within an increasingly extravagant horror story. The BBFC record corroborates these concerns.
The setup
Madison (Annabelle Wallis) experiences visions of brutal murders and discovers that the attacks are happening beyond her imagination. As she tries to understand the connection, the investigation reaches into a childhood she cannot fully account for. Explaining much more would spend the film's main currency before it has a chance to use it.
Taking the nonsense seriously
Wan's established command of moving cameras and elaborate horror spaces makes this a useful test of the difference between a silly story and careless filmmaking. A plot can be preposterous while its images are carefully organised. The film invites attention to both, especially when ordinary investigative scenes begin to feel too small for the thing they are investigating.
The medical opening, emphatic performances and heightened visual language also establish a register larger than everyday realism. That gives the later escalation somewhere to go. It does not oblige a viewer to enjoy every solemn exchange on the way there. The investigation is the less distinctive material: it has to carry solemn explanation while the film’s strongest invention waits in the physical payoff.
There is an additional tonal problem worth treating carefully. Madison's abuse and reproductive grief are not amusing because the larger story becomes absurd. Her relationship with Sydney gives her a connection beyond that suffering, although much of the investigation still treats her as a problem other people must decode.
Corny DNA
This belongs near the collection's territory of intentional extravagance. Its unusual physical ideas and melodramatic delivery may be entertaining on their own terms. Numerical scores remain open; a high weirdness score would not, by itself, settle whether the first two acts are worth sitting through.
Verdict
Watch with caveats — proposed. The provisional case is strongest for viewers who enjoy horror becoming operatic and physically outrageous. Anyone looking for consistent realism or a tightly reasoned police investigation needs a different expectation. Its most inventive material arrives late, and the route there is a real part of the bargain.
Spoilers from here
Reveal the plot details and ending
A body with another driver
Gabriel is Madison's parasitic twin, largely removed in childhood but still connected to her brain. His renewed control turns her body into the means of committing the murders. The police-station slaughter makes that arrangement visible through an impossible-looking reversal of movement. The plot account corroborates the reveal and the later struggle for control.
The explanation is absurdly elaborate. Its payoff is physical: a person the film has framed as a witness becomes a body moving according to an entirely different set of demands. The spectacle has more invention than the investigation delivering us to it. That imbalance is the main caveat, and it cannot be erased by the pleasure of finally seeing the design operate.
A different claim to family
Madison confines Gabriel within her mind and protects Sydney, her adoptive sister. The ending makes chosen attachment the answer to a biological relationship that has become possession. It gives Madison a decisive action after a story that repeatedly deprives her of control. The final electrical suggestion leaves room for recurrence; it does not turn her victory into a medically credible cure.