You've always heard of filmmakers trying to break into Hollywood by making a low budget horror movie. The idea being that they could piggy-back off the genre film's success in order to make what I suppose some people would call “real” movies. As far as I can tell, this hasn't actually happened that often. Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson are only a few exceptions that come to mind. Having said that, after directing two billion dollar grossing action movies, James Wan certainly could have stopped making horror movies, if he wanted to. Instead, he's continuously returned to the genre that he clearly loves. The director took the blank check presumably afforded to him after “Aquaman” made a bundle for WB and spent it on “Malignant,” a weirder and wilder horror movie than any of the previous ones he made. While “Malignant” failed to recreate the box office success of “Saw,” “Insidious,” or “The Conjuring,” it was well received among a certain breed of horror nerd. In fact, it's also the movie that finally convinced me that I actually like this guy.
Madison has no memories of her life before being adopted by her foster parents. She barely recalls her childhood before her sister, Sydney, was born. She has moved back into the home in Seattle where they grew up. Her marriage is strained by the number of miscarriages she's had, which her abusive husband blames her for. After smashing Madison's head into the wall, an intruder sneaks into the house and violently murders the husband. Following another miscarriage, Madison begins to have disturbing visions of someone called Gabriel violently murdering people... All of whom are doctors, who treated her as a child. She discovers that “Gabriel” was also the name of her disturbing imaginary friend as a kid. With the cops suspicious of her connections to the killing, Madison and Sydney dig more into her past to discover a disturbing truth. Gabriel is very real and his connection to Madison is far deeper than she could ever guess.
“Malignant” can be described as a type of movie that is, when done poorly, insufferably self-indulgent but, when handled right, results in some of the coolest motion pictures ever: The director just shoving in stuff he likes for the entirety of the run time. As evident by all of his haunted house movies, James Wan is fond of foreboding old buildings, surrounded by fog and containing creepy attics. Extra points if it's an abandoned hospital too. “Saw” featured a mild detective element, which also appears here. The killer has long gothy hair and wears a black trench coat, not unlike a spectre that previously appeared in “Insidious.” It's only by some miracle that “Malignant” doesn't feature a creepy ventriloquist dummy. There's a sequence set in the Seattle underground, one gets the feeling mostly because the director had been wanting to utilize it for a while. The killer broadcasting their thoughts via scrambled electronics also strikes me as a premise that had been searching for a home. Somehow, “Malignant” doesn't feel like a grab bag of random, unrelated ingredients, all these wild premises blending together into one kooky narrative.
This is not the only obvious influence Wan happily points to in “Malignant.” Early in production, the film was described as being “in line with a giallo film.” Upon release, a lot of people followed this thread and declared "Malignant" a full-blown giallo homage. I think that's overstating it. It's a murder mystery of sorts, with a black gloved killer that wields a distinctive knife. A pair of chummy detectives are also on the murderer's trail. However, they aren't the protagonists and the story eventually leans in a totally different direction, more akin to a modern revamping of an eighties monster movie. When Wan said "Malignant" was giallo adjacent, what he really meant is that it was Argento inspired. Which mostly meant drawing from the exaggerated color palette of "Suspiria." Not that this is a complaint. Wan has sprinkled some neon reds into his previous films and goes full-hog with it here. Searing red lighting stands alongside deep blacks and stylized blues. The result is a movie that is way more striking, visually, than the likes of "Insidious" or "The Conjuring." Callbacks to horror nerd favorites from the seventies and eighties is another thing Wan likes, another ingredient swirling around in the stew of influences that is "Malignant."
He doesn't stop there. When the film first debuted in theaters, I was told to go in as blind as possible. However, I still caught wind of the movie containing elements people described as "Henenlotter-esque." Wan also enjoys wild twists in the narrative, having included them to varying degrees of success from time to time. For its first half, "Malignant" seems to be chasing a hacky story swerve straight from the Donald Kaufman playbook: That the hero and the villain are the same person, suffering from a split personality. The script repeatedly suggests Gabriel is supernatural, as displayed by his various superpowers. However, his deep link to Madison's mind makes you expect him to merely be a repressed persona. Remembering the comparison to Henenlotter, I fully expected a "Basket Case" reveal: That Gabriel was a conjoined twin of Madison's, separated in their youth and now back for revenge. That he targets the doctors that experimented on them makes you think this. That's a lot closer to what "Malignant" is doing but this hides another, far wackier left-turn. That the script continuously kept me guessing, going in ever more unexpected directions, made that first viewing a delightful experience. For bonus measure, a "Saw" style twist – that an imprisoned supporting player is a lot closer than expected – occurs early in the story in an explosively dramatic fashion.
In other words, "Malignant" is having fun. It dismisses the need to be bound to boring plausibility, not caring if you laugh at it or with it. This instinct informs the choice to have something else follow Wan here from his blockbusters. With a half-hour to go, "Malignant" suddenly shifts again into an over-the-top action flick. Yes, this hideously deformed movie monster with a delightfully weird gimmick also knows kung-fu. Did I mention Gabriel has super strength too? This results in an incredibly entertaining, beautifully unexpected sequence of the villain tearing through an entire police station, graphically snapping bones, crushing heads, leaping through the air, and tossing a chair a yard away and exactly hitting the intended target. "Malignant" fully commits to this swing into Hong Kong action, with skillfully choreographed stunts and a novel combination of puppetry, make-up, and a very talented contortionist/dancer to pull it all off. I suppose what I'm saying is more horror movies would benefit from having their bad guy, without warning, start throwing out some pencak silat moves over an hour into their runtime.
Horror movies aimed right at the Fangoria crowd, assembled from random parts of seventies and eighties classics, aren't often especially deep affairs. "Malignant's" script is credited to Akela Cooper – the author of "Hell Fest," another underrated throwback to eighties horror – but is based on a story by Wan and his wife, Ingrid Bisu. Meaning some of his writerly quirks are undeniably present. "Malignant" is mostly concerned with catching the viewer off-guard with successively wilder twists. However, something else James Wan likes are stories of childhood trauma returning to haunt someone as an adult. That was the central thrust of his "Insidious" movies, the ghostly presence eventually emerging as a symbol of abusive parents, and "Dead Silence" played with that a little too. All throughout her childhood, Madison has heard voices telling her to do awful things. Once she received the proper medical treatment, this lurking voice was suppressed deep within her skull... Until a blow from her abusive husband awoke that subconscious personality. Gabriel targets the doctors that tried to destroy him but also Madison's sister and birth mother. The implication seems to be that Gabriel wouldn't exist without this primordial parental abandonment. He also sees Madison's foster parents having another child through biological means as further evidence that he is unwanted. This turns Gabriel into a symbol of mental illness, a monster inherited from Madison's biological parents that is always lurking in the back of her skull. He wants to destroy the people she loves, to remind Madison that she deserves to be alone and unloved. The title refers to the exact nature of what Gabriel is. However, it also refers to another type of malignancy born out of our genes that waits to sprout up again, like any tumor or cancer would.
How much of "Malignant" is going for campy laughs over intense chills is debatable. The film largely strikes me as in-on-its-own-joke while playing the material fairly straight. This is true of most of the supporting cast. George Young and Michole Briana White play the detectives on the case. Young has a perpetual look of annoyance on her face, as if she can't believe any of this shit, while Young carefully tows the line between being sympathetic towards Madison's cause and baffled by what he sees. Maddie Hasson brings a plucky spirit to Sydney, someone eager to defend her older sister and that the audience can root for. All the actors playing the doctors involved in Gabriel's past, Jacqueline McKenzie and Christine Clemenson primarily, play the material with utmost seriousness. They treat the pulpy melodrama of the film as if they are living it themselves.
A funny thing about even the best performances in "Malignant" is that they act as if they have been dubbed into English. If Wan truly was seeking to replicate the look and feel of a seventies Italian flick, I suppose this hard-to-nail-down effect was all too intentional. However, that odd off-beat quality to the acting is most noticeable in the film's lead. Annabelle Willis previously starred (not as the doll) in the first "Annabelle," so one assumed Wan must see something in her. Truthfully, her performance is kind of terrible in "Malignant." She speaks every line as if she's on the verge of breaking into an operatic scream. Her attempts to play Madison as panicked or traumatized come across as jittery and overdone. When the character has to be heroic, she is far less believable. It doesn't distract from me enjoying the rest of the movie. However, it is another noticeably weird thing about this off-beat flick.
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