M3GAN
M3GAN (Amie Donald, voiced by Jenna Davis) in M3GAN.
We’re no longer strangers to creepy dolls as movie-goers. From the silver-tongued slashings of one Charles Lee Ray (Child’s Play, the Chucky franchise) to Dead Silence, The Boy, and so on. Blumhouse has capitalised on this popular horror villain choice twice now (including M3GAN), but it’s a fourpeat in James Wan’s decorated writing portfolio. He’s been involved in the creation of Billy the Puppet (Saw), a different Billy the Puppet (Dead Silence), Annabelle (The Conjuring), and M3GAN. For Blumhouse, M3GAN, Annabelle’s cyborg cousin, has now repeated commercial success by taking the 2023 box office by her synthetic hands. She’s already gotten herself a sequel dated for release in 2025 (M3GAN 2.0).
It'd be unfair to say that PG-13 horror doesn’t work. In fact, Jason Blum himself recently posited Drag Me to Hell as an example of a scary, effective horror film that doesn’t need to push itself into gory or deeply unsettling territory. That being said, I was hoping more out of M3GAN, which feels too clean and polished for its own good. Much like the Child’s Play remake, we’re missing an element of gnarl that both dampers the horror and comedy aspect of what these films are trying to achieve.
Gemma (Allison Williams) is an exceptional roboticist working as an engineering and ideas grunt for Funki, who mainly produces ‘Purrpetual Petz’, a fluffy friend which serves as an endless stream of bullshit entertainment for iPad kids. After her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) is left orphaned, she becomes inspired to finally develop the Model 3 Generative Android (or M3GAN, for short) which she believes can help children to process their complex feelings through conversations with artificial intelligence. It’s a brand-new friend for your child, for the low price of $10,000. However, after Cady forms a robust emotional attachment to the doll, Gemma struggles to set boundaries between the doll and her niece. M3GAN doesn’t like this, not one bit.
From an entertainment perspective, M3GAN is amusing. The film is filled with memeable moments like when the doll is hilariously dragged around by a German Shepard, or when M3GAN abruptly starts running like a horse on all fours (like how I used to go up the stairs as a child, representation matters!). We also get a few inventive kills to thrill us with. It’s always fun when a horror film targets assholes, and most of M3GAN’s victims tend to always have it coming.
There’s a couple of intriguing questions raised regarding the ethics of placing new and exciting technologies into the hands of developing minds that I found to be appealing from a narrative standpoint, but overall, M3GAN doesn’t have anything that interesting to present. Most characters are rather aggravating, and you’re only really rooting for this killer doll. Nothing remarkably over-the-top happens and the film doesn’t succeed at horror in the slightest. If you’re going to go down the PG-13 route, it’s worth getting inventive with the execution (literally), the off-screen kills aren’t engaging anyone. It’s all too tame, and that’s a shame.
Chucky for the TikTok generation has its moments, sure, but it’s a film that’s cut like they’re trying to edit it for viewing on an airplane. Let M3GAN have the slice and dice, f-bombs, and batshit craziness that she deserves!
