Not just for connoisseurs of murderdoll cinema or those in need of some post-holidays satire, M3gan (written as such within the body of the film despite having a different, more stylized font approach in the key art and title card) is a sleek, campy hoot that delivers the expected kills but also manages to cut deeper and draw blood with its portrait of tech ethics and family obligations.
Gemma (Allison Williams, who understands the assignment to be as relatable as a genius polymath roboticist can be to the general public) is a designer of interactive toys who’s not particularly skittish about using questionable tactics to make sure that Funki Toys remain essential for today’s kids. She’s a weirdo aunt mad scientist, but she’s got a diverse team and an idea for something big: a toy that actually interacts with its assigned child, learning and evolving so as to make things easier for busy parents.
You could call M3gan a Twilight Zone-styled tale of symbolic retribution for a scientist who designs things for kids without understanding them, or really understanding how to interact with them. But it’s only that film part of the time, because this specific kind of film lives or dies by its murderdoll, and M3gan (a blend of actress Amie Donald, puppeteer/effects artist Kathy Tse, some CG, and the voice of Jenna Davis) is a delight, skewing much more toward the verbal, mordant Chucky side of the continuum than the passive, silent Annabelle end. M3gan has impeccable outfits and the driest, snidest sense of humor. She looks like Italian horror legend Ania Pieroni, with eerily luminescent eyes. She’s a drama queen, with each withering aside calibrated for maximum impact. At times, she is a perceptive source of strength and resilience for little Cady (the child whose orphaning sets much of the story in motion). But she’s also got moments where she’s ’90s Parker Posey with Paul Rudnick lines, and it’s kind of awesome how much the filmmakers lean into giving her Extremely Online vibes.
“Was that a literal wig-snatching?” I whispered to my friend at one point, in awe of the gesture to such an extent that I had to break my usual rules about keeping quiet during a screening because this was just too gloriously gay a gesture. M3gan is for the children; it’s in her programming. But it’s also very obvious that in expanding her central processor and protocols, M3gan has learned a lesson from Erika Jayne and is determined to give the gays everything they want; this film has a murder set piece scored to a Skatt Bros. song.
There’s certainly a lot of meme-worthy moments in M3gan (her murderous dancing fits have already been infiltrating the work of drag artists), but there’s an acknowledgment that her murderdoll legacy as a robot is a bit more complex a lineage than the Robert/Chucky/Annabelle pipeline. M3gan shows respect to her ancestors HAL-9000, Talky Tina, ED-209, BB and Tiffany while even deploying some Bratz doll vibes and Boston Dynamics attack movement. But what elevates the character (and film) is that we literally see every choice at each step that led to her fulfilling her destiny as a murderdoll. We like Gemma, and Williams does a great job in making her decisions as a reluctant guardian into something that anyone can relate to. And we recognize each of the little steps along the way that lead to moral crisis, impromptu auriculectomies, disco murder and even a full-on Ghost in the Shell-style robot fight. But even as we delight in M3gan’s bad behavior, we never transgress Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley rules — we understand whose fault this all is.
Being that this film is coming out from Blumhouse via Universal, it would be very easy to allow for a one-off film in which M3gan, Chucky and Tiffany could team up or have a fight to the death, or whatever Don Mancini and Akela Cooper might feel like. Because M3gan is a great crowd-pleaser of a PG-13 movie, and it does the work for establishing a new icon in postmodern horror. Director Gerard Johnstone (he made the great 2014 Kiwi horror film Housebound) has a gift for balancing tone and getting good performances that retain their grounding in what can be considered ridiculous situations.
And it also, quite inadvertently, provided me with the most gloriously “old-school Nashville”-ass experience I’ve had in a decade, which is getting out of a press screening and calling a songwriter friend to let them know that I just saw their movie. It was a kicky delight, the perfect capper to a grand evening of stylized fun with good friends and cathartic, sly sci-fi horror.
