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| Courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures |
A few years ago mainstream horror director
James Wan’s creative pal Leigh Whannell, whose initial claim to fame involved writing
and starring in Wan’s smash hit thriller Saw, seemed to soar right past
the director with his ultraviolent sci-fi/action thriller Upgrade
followed by his critically acclaimed remake of The Invisible Man. Wan was also in the midst of shifting gears,
moving away from his horror roots to take on big studio properties such as Furious
7 and the Aquaman movies for the DCEU.
But in between what Wan described as
his mega-budget “fish movies”, he decided to go back to basics and kick out a
smaller-budgeted genre thriller with hints of giallo replete with a gloved
killer, the psychic thriller and plain old horror slashings. The resulting film, Malignant,
released simultaneously in theaters and HBO Max by Warner Brothers, is not only
the year’s most utterly bonkers gonzo horror film it could well be the very
best thing Wan has ever done as a director and one that threatens the current mainstream
horror crown currently worn by Whannell.
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| Courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures |
After a grotesque House on Haunted
Hill inspired prologue, Malignant finds pregnant Seattle resident Madison
Lake (Annabelle Wallis) in an abusive relationship with her husband Derek (Jake
Abel) who in a drunken fury smashes her head against a wall. After locking herself in her room, she has a
nightmare about a black trenchcoated assailant murdering her husband and
awakens to find him dead the next day.
From here as a police investigation
mounts involving Detective Kekoa Shaw (George Young) and Madison’s younger
sister Sydney (Maddie Hasson), both the film’s heroine and the film itself
start veering more and more towards hallucinatory psychedelic insanity before
conceptually and structurally it builds towards a wacky hyperkinetic conflagration. With hints of everything from The Brood
to The Manitou, throwing caution to the wind for a furiously wild dive
into near-absurdist horror tropes taken to new ridiculous heights, Malignant
soon shows its mutant face figuratively and literally with a premise so
deliberately preposterous we’re somewhat inclined to laugh at and with it.
Based on a screenplay by Akela Cooper
and Outlast helmer J.T. Petty from an original story he co-wrote with
his wife Ingrid Bisu, Malignant might seem like a quickie to Wan but
from the outset is clearly the film he’s been working towards his whole
career. Brazenly confident in its own
screwball wackiness with assured masterful direction by Wan and his cameraman
Michael Burgess who do some stunning tracking and crane shots throughout the
film, Malignant as a horror thriller is a lot of fun to look at with Wan
as our carnie rollercoaster operator.
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| Courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures |
Equally out there is the film’s tonally
off-the-map soundtrack by Joseph Bishara which gives the whole thing both a
creepy and oddly snarky aura about itself.
If you’re not really sure how to take the ideas rapidly being dealt out
by the movie, the soundtrack will make further certain you’re completely
confused how to respond to this untamed wild animal of a movie.
Performance-wise the ensemble cast led
by Annabelle Wallis is mostly good with a killer voice (rendered by Ray Chase)
that easily puts the talking Saw doll Billy to shame. Though the film doesn’t quite have the same
degree of star power his surrounding recent pictures have, Malignant excels
at being Wan’s most director-driven picture to date with some sequences that
border on being playfully technically innovative.
It’s funny how with many major
directors working on big-oversized film productions, often times their best
works are done on the cheap and fly in between those giant movies. This is arguably true of Stanley Kubrick,
Francis Ford Coppola, Wong Kar Wai and Ben Wheatley, all of whom at different
points in their careers scaled things back to do a smaller flick on a whim and
in so doing made their freshest and most confident films that somehow are the
most expressive of their individual personalities.
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| Courtesy of Warner Brothers Pictures |
Malignant is not the best horror film of the year and moreover is kind
of a lunatic of a film, but I’ll be damned if this isn’t the first time James
Wan has truly shown his face. Unquestionably
my favorite work of his to date and one of the year’s most deliriously
entertaining movies of the horror, giallo or any thriller subgenre for that
matter. A film that gazes from the protective
railings of plausibility before slowly and completely jumping over them in a
way that plays out like an impish trickster taking familiar horror rules and
throwing them right out the window, like the mysterious “villain” or whatever
is happening says throughout the film, “It’s time to cut out the cancer!”
--Andrew Kotwicki
