The best kind of movies are the ones that stick with you in one way or another. I've long felt that the worst thing a piece of entertainment can be is forgettable, and in that way Malignant definitely succeeds. While a good portion of reviews and comments I've seen from people in regards to this movie boil it down to "this sucked" or the like, what I think a good deal of people are missing out on here is the meta narrative at play.
For the first hour or so, this movie plays out exactly as you'd expect any run-of-the-mill supernatural horror movie might, with awful sound editing, spoooooky dark visuals, and all the other usual cliches firmly in place. But when that final act bursts in, everything you've seen beforehand begins to re-contextualize in the most maddening way, really putting the audience in the unique position of having to decide for themselves how much they're willing to give the movie in return for their time. Watching this movie at home on HBO with my wife, I was probably driving her nuts as I loudly pointed out all the issues I was having with it for about 80 minutes, after which I found myself laughing even harder both at the movie and myself for the trick it pulled on me. Is this a brilliant movie or a terrible one? Why not both?
In most conventional senses, this movie is pretty lame. The acting is weak, the filmmaking is very standard for the genre, and you'll probably find yourself guessing the twist (or at least something pretty close to it) before it reveals itself, but by the end none of that really mattered to me at all. Knowing James Wan as a filmmaker going in did nothing but revalidate my preconceptions of the movie going in, and force me into the mindset of someone who has to just accept that he'll never really grow as a filmmaker. And while I could never consider this movie a step forward for him in terms of storytelling, I feel he uses his own past films as a deliberate misdirection for those of us who knew his work going in.
One thing I have to criticize about this movie actually has nothing to do with the movie itself, but I want to point out the advertising and comments people have been making towards it being reminiscent of the Italian Giallo movies primarily released in the 1970s. While, if you dig into all the "rules" of the genre (the list of which are pretty loose in a film noir-esque way) it does tick quite a few of those boxes, the primary issue with drawing this comparison is in the very distinct difference in visual styles. Giallos utilize more primary colors and don't have that Conjuring-era horror look about them, which feels a bit like false advertising to the people out there who love those Italian horrors for their striking lighting and colors. This isn't so much a flaw as something I wanted to point out in case anyone reading this was expecting it to look like an Argento film or something. It doesn't look like Argento. Moving on.
Without going into individual story beats or spoiling the events of the movie, there isn't much more I can say apart from just how quickly this idiotic movie turned around on me. While all the pieces had been put into place over the course of the first 2 acts, I didn't notice or appreciate them until the movie had almost finished, and while I still found a good deal of the horror aspects to be severely lacking, the wacky effect overall was too wild and entertaining for me to even care. This isn't something I could watch as a real horror movie, but I also don't know what else to call it. It's too bad to be good, but too genius to be bad. There is an enigmatic quality to this movie that makes it impossible for me to fully recommend, but hard for me to not want to see the reactions of people who watch it.
Overall, I really can see why people love, hate, or are somewhere in-between with this movie. It does everything right and wrong at the same time in all the most confusing and hilarious ways, the result of which is a mess of a movie that I equally love and find incredibly bad. But it's movies like this that linger in the mind and find bizarre cult followings, which I can pretty safely say is inevitable for this movie. It's awful and I think I loved it.
1 comment:
Thanks for the warning I won't be watching this one. P.C.
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