Are there movies that are ‘review-proof’? Not in the sense that phrase is typically employed, referring to movies so big and franchises so popular that they’ll succeed no matter what. Malignant is not Batman. Instead, the question is: How do you review a movie like Malignant? How do you discuss your earnest emotional reaction to a film that has absolutely no interest in provoking any emotion beyond “Wait what the fuck?” Did it succeed in doing so? Yes. Does that mean this will be a super positive review? Also yes.
So, what is Malignant? Let’s get the stats out of the way. It’s a horror movie on HBO Max. It’s also in theaters I guess, but who the hell would go to theaters right now? Akela Cooper write it. James Wan directed it. It’s about two hours long. Trigger warnings in effect for domestic abuse and miscarriage. It cost $40 million dollars to make. And it’s fucking bananas.
Maddie (Annabelle Wallis) is a desperate woman with an abusive partner. She has a deep desire to have a child, but she keeps miscarrying. One day, a routine fight with her husband takes a sudden, brutal when he slams her head into the wall. That night, a strange figure appears in their house, murdering her husband and assaulting Maddie. After the events of that night, Maddie begins to have strange visions, imagining in vivid detail a series of strange murders happening across Seattle. A pair of cops (George Young and Michole Briana White) think she’s involved. Her flighty sister (Maddie Hasson) thinks she’s psychic.
What connection does Maddie have to this strange killer? And what does it have to do with the abandoned demon asylum the film opens on?
“It’s time to cut out the cancer.”
James Wan is technically an incredibly gifted director. I didn’t particularly like Saw, but it definitely had vision. The same could be said of the Christian-supremacist Conjuring-verse or the weirdly fantastical Insidious. Malignant, likewise, displays genuine vision. There are shots I’ve never seen before in a film, like the overhead shot of a panicked Maddie (Annabelle Wallis) fleeing through her house. The shot is distant, like we’re watching an adult woman trapped in a dollhouse. It is persistent, tense, and unexpected.
What he is not terribly good at is picking scripts. Or writing them, to be honest. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, which Wan has a story credit on, remains the worst film of 2021 by a country mile. And, you know, Malignant isn’t not playing with some of the same tools, with Wan’s worrying obsession with the tropes of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s — and of modern Qanon. It’s just that, when Wan doesn’t direct, there’s nothing to prop up the films’ deeply goofy logic. When he does, his technical proficiency is capable of covering up deep flaws in a script.
Or it was, up until now.
Malignant is a deeply silly movie. It’s a tense movie, sure. Its scares are effective and interesting. There is, for example, a really fun shot of just a couch cushion moving ever so slightly. Is it resettling, or did some unseen figure just stand up? There are moments like that in most of Wan’s films, bits where his technical brilliance overcomes his weirdest impulses to create these instantly iconic visuals. Sometimes they’re small, like the way the camera follows the moment where Dwayne Johnson ‘rock bottoms’ Jason Statham in Fast & Furious 7. Simple but evocative. It sticks with you.
What I’d never considered was what would happen if those moments were put in service of a deeply weird vision. Like, for example, the scene in Malignant in which a cop chases what appears to be a parkour-doing demon through a decrepit underground city. What the fuck? Why would you do that?
“Are you saying that the killer is your imaginary friend?”
But here’s the thing: That combination, of technical competence and narrative lunacy? It works. It makes it feel like an exploitation film. Malignant isn’t really an exploitation film, of course. Unlike, say, Murder Death Koreatown, there’s nothing particularly transgressive here. But the thing is, it speaks the language of those films. From a boilerplate first 90% that explodes into madness at an unexpected moment to some of the late-film effects that wouldn’t be out of place in a Troma film, Malignant gets it. HBO Max is a weird place to watch a movie that should have been released by Scream Factory in a boxset with three other forgotten oddities in 2017, but still: If that’s your vibe, you’ll love this.
If it’s not your vibe, though, there’s very little here. This is a movie that plays with domestic abuse and miscarriages in its opening acts. Like any good exploitation film, it plays fast and loose with serious issues it is neither interested in nor capable of dealing with. It isn’t for everyone.
But it was for me. My only regret is that I watched it alone. Malignant is a movie it should be illegal to watch alone. This is a “boozy Saturday night with friends” film. And, unexpectedly, it fucking rules.