mistressofmuses (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mistressofmuses) wrote2021-10-06 08:21 pm
mistressofmuses) wrote2021-10-06 08:21 pm
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Glad it was *cheap* movie day... a pseudo-review of Malignant
We went to see Malignant yesterday, since it seems likely that this will be the last week it's in theater. (Alex and I were the only two in the theater for the mid-afternoon showing.)
I stayed away from any in-depth reviews of it, but was told that it was really original and creative and had a great twist. I watch and enjoy a lot of horror, so I had high-ish hopes that I would at least like it fairly well.
I... did not like it.
I'm not doing a real review*, more just a list of my thoughts on it, but I'll cut it before any big spoilers. (And I WILL spoil the big twist, so don't click if you want to see it and be surprised!) If you want to avoid even minor spoilers, skip the whole thing.
*This proved to be a lie; I apparently had lots to say, and it's very close to an actual review, except it's a lot more rambly and disjointed. Dammit. Maybe I'll fix it up and dust off the horror review blog, but no promises.
Okay, the parts I did enjoy:
- the room-melty effects (which are on display in the trailer) are real cool. Similar-ish to the Silent Hill movie's transition from foggy world to otherworld, though less stylized, but still visually neat.
- there are also some good practical effects with the "creature". Also good physical body-motion by the actress portraying the monster, including an unsettling "why does it seem to be moving backward? That's creepy" motion that is later explained, but was clearly visible before the reveal.
- it pretty much launches into the full horror pretty quick, without any real fake-out ramp-up moments, which I can appreciate.
- the initial mystery that's presented is interesting, and I enjoyed it at the beginning. Unfortunately, I liked it less and less as it continued and more was explained.
- the cast was fine.
- there were some neat creepy setpieces (abandoned hospital, Seattle underground tunnels), though I'm not sure they were used to their full potential.
- the opening credits had some neat design things, where duplicate letters in people's names did a cell-division type motion. It was a really little thing, but it was neat and memorable and thematically fitting.
- I guess I'm glad the twist wasn't just "ooh, she was just ~crazy~ all along".
BUT AS FOR HOW I REALLY FEEL:
I thought the twist and how it was explained and dealt with was stupid as hell.
Quick plot summary, in case you haven't seen it, but are reading this: The monster of the film is a mostly-human-looking creature that is going around gruesomely murdering some seemingly random targets, starting with the main character, Emily's, abusive husband. Emily is somehow directly witnessing the murders themselves, as if she were in the room when they occur, but is unable to intervene. She goes to the police, who are initially skeptical... then grow suspicious as they discover that all the victims have connections to her.
Here's the big spoiler: the "monster" that's hunting and murdering people is actually Emily's evil semi-conjoined twin that was mostly surgically removed from her as a child, except that because they were joined at the brainstem, part of him was just sort of squished into her skull. When her abusive husband smashed her head into the wall, it woke the evil twin, "Gabriel", up. Now he's seeking revenge against the doctors that tried to remove him and treated her when they were children, plus their biological mother who gave them up into the care of the medical facility.
Most of the film seems to be going for a relatively standard "paranormal" type horror setup - Emily/other characters/the audience glimpse Gabriel when the lights flicker (and text during the opening credits reveal he can somehow absorb and utilize electricity), he clearly has superhuman strength, Emily can hear his voice, but he also makes phone calls and speaks through the radio. It's revealed that Emily spoke to him throughout her childhood as an "imaginary friend", though she insisted he was real, and he tried to convince her to do horrible things. She claims that he's "the devil." As it starts to seem that the victims are related to her childhood, and that maybe she's somehow been involved, then it sort of veers closer to a "demonic possession" type story.
Buuuut it wants to subvert that and go for it being a physical thing rather than any sort of paranormal or demonic entity. The ultimate explanation is that Gabriel has been taking control over her body to commit the murders, and has been using their mental connection to make her *believe* that she was elsewhere, going about her normal life, while he was doing this. This sort of treads the line between "accidentally unreliable narrator" which is a thing I can enjoy, and "unfair mystery" which is a thing I don't.
More or less, I just couldn't ever suspend my disbelief enough to buy into the explanation.
There are still SOME paranormal aspects that it keeps as "real" - the superhuman strength, the never-explained "eating/absorbing electricity" thing (which I also hated for being inconsistent), the ability for Gabriel to speak through radios and cell phones... so I wish it would have just stuck with a fully paranormal explanation instead of what they went with.
Some earlier scenes don't make sense in light of the explanation, which in my opinion is what pushes it into that "unfair mystery" category, and makes this a BAD twist. I am of the VERY STRONG opinion that a good twist is one that casts the rest of the work in a new light once the twist has been revealed. This does the opposite - it makes earlier scenes into plot holes.
One of the better creepy scenes (imo) is very early in the movie (and was also in the trailer), which is where the abusive husband walks into a dim room lit only by the static on the TV, and sees "Emily" on the couch. But as soon as he turns on the light, she vanishes, but the camera pans to the couch cushion, and it shifts like there's something sitting on it.
...except this isn't something being "shown" to Emily as a false memory; it's from the husband's perspective, so it makes no sense if Gabriel is a purely physical entity in Emily's body.
There's no indication given that Emily truly has any special healing abilities - in fact, the wound on her head keeps breaking open and bleeding. This is revealed to be because Gabriel is LITERALLY breaking through her skull, and then just... closing it back up? But he also snaps all her joints out of place so that he can use her body while facing "forward" out the back of her head (which is why the physical actress was actually moving backwards)... and somehow she was never even slightly sore from having all her joints dislocated and snapped back in. Maybe we're supposed to assume she's super great at healing or doesn't feel much pain... except the first scene we see her in is her coming home early from work because her back hurts so badly during an advanced pregnancy. (This is absolutely nitpicky, and is the kind of thing I would happily ignore if everything else made sense, or if it had been given an explanation, but... it just added to the things that bothered me.)
As much as I mostly liked the practical effects, a couple of the later "fight scenes" when Gabriel took control and decided to fight the whole police precinct came across as comical, ridiculous over the top action scenes in a way I don't think they were intended to.
The dramatic emotional moments ALSO often made me try not to laugh. I don't think any of the cast were bad, I just really couldn't buy in to the big, heartfelt "I may be adopted, but you're my REAL family" speeches.
(AND ANOTHER THING: The adoption didn't seem to be a secret... except from her sister (the younger bio daughter of Emily's adoptive parents.) It's a specific scene where Emily gives her an "I want to be a mother because I've always wanted to know what it's like to be related by blood to someone... because... I'M ADOPTED!" speech. But her mom isn't surprised or upset by Emily coming to later ask about the adoption. It gave it kind of a weird tonal inconsistency regarding that.)
And dear god, I feel like I could go decades without seeing another "female protagonist of a horror movie is primarily motivated by childbirth/miscarriage/infertility" and they would STILL be overrepresented. It's not that those AREN'T big themes that feature in many people's lives, or aren't a very real-life source of fear and anxiety, or that there aren't movies that explore those themes well, but it seems like it's frequently lazy shorthand for character motivation. Emily does have a miscarriage early on, after the first time Gabriel attacks, and it's stated that it's happened to her multiple times before. Considering that part of the plot is that she and Gabriel were given up by their unwed teenage mother, it's not totally unrelated to the rest of the story, but... the thing that finally seems to give her the strength to wrest control back from Gabriel is her sister telling her that Gabriel is responsible for her miscarriages because he was absorbing the fetuses to gain strength. Which... comes out of nowhere, because we'd just been told that he "woke up" when her husband threw her into a wall, so it doesn't seem like he was aware enough previously to do something like that, and also, fucking how, when their only point of connection is the brainstem? And I frankly hated that being her ~truest~ motivation and strength.
Closing thoughts:
If the movie had wanted to go for the "body-horror over-the-top monster mutation" thing, then it should have gone for that. If it wanted to be a "creepy paranormal murder-mystery evil entity" thing, it should have gone for that. And as much as I sometimes enjoy genre and subgenre mashups, this particular blend it went for did not work at all for me.
The best aspects were, imo, the visuals... and for the melting room visuals (plus explorations of motherhood/adoption/being the victim of a past you weren't a willing participant in/possession-but-not) I'd rather watch the Silent Hill movie again.
And for the best scenes of Gabriel seeming to flicker in and out of existence with the light, and one of the murder victims lit by neon lights outside his window, plus a murderous creature from a character's past, I'd way rather watch Lights Out again. (Not as big a fan of how that one was a "this monster is a manifestation of someone's mental illness", but overall I really enjoyed it. And to be honest, the more I think about this one, the more it seems like all the aspects I did enjoy were completely lifted from that movie.)
I stayed away from any in-depth reviews of it, but was told that it was really original and creative and had a great twist. I watch and enjoy a lot of horror, so I had high-ish hopes that I would at least like it fairly well.
I... did not like it.
I'm not doing a real review*, more just a list of my thoughts on it, but I'll cut it before any big spoilers. (And I WILL spoil the big twist, so don't click if you want to see it and be surprised!) If you want to avoid even minor spoilers, skip the whole thing.
*This proved to be a lie; I apparently had lots to say, and it's very close to an actual review, except it's a lot more rambly and disjointed. Dammit. Maybe I'll fix it up and dust off the horror review blog, but no promises.
Okay, the parts I did enjoy:
- the room-melty effects (which are on display in the trailer) are real cool. Similar-ish to the Silent Hill movie's transition from foggy world to otherworld, though less stylized, but still visually neat.
- there are also some good practical effects with the "creature". Also good physical body-motion by the actress portraying the monster, including an unsettling "why does it seem to be moving backward? That's creepy" motion that is later explained, but was clearly visible before the reveal.
- it pretty much launches into the full horror pretty quick, without any real fake-out ramp-up moments, which I can appreciate.
- the initial mystery that's presented is interesting, and I enjoyed it at the beginning. Unfortunately, I liked it less and less as it continued and more was explained.
- the cast was fine.
- there were some neat creepy setpieces (abandoned hospital, Seattle underground tunnels), though I'm not sure they were used to their full potential.
- the opening credits had some neat design things, where duplicate letters in people's names did a cell-division type motion. It was a really little thing, but it was neat and memorable and thematically fitting.
- I guess I'm glad the twist wasn't just "ooh, she was just ~crazy~ all along".
BUT AS FOR HOW I REALLY FEEL:
I thought the twist and how it was explained and dealt with was stupid as hell.
Quick plot summary, in case you haven't seen it, but are reading this: The monster of the film is a mostly-human-looking creature that is going around gruesomely murdering some seemingly random targets, starting with the main character, Emily's, abusive husband. Emily is somehow directly witnessing the murders themselves, as if she were in the room when they occur, but is unable to intervene. She goes to the police, who are initially skeptical... then grow suspicious as they discover that all the victims have connections to her.
Here's the big spoiler: the "monster" that's hunting and murdering people is actually Emily's evil semi-conjoined twin that was mostly surgically removed from her as a child, except that because they were joined at the brainstem, part of him was just sort of squished into her skull. When her abusive husband smashed her head into the wall, it woke the evil twin, "Gabriel", up. Now he's seeking revenge against the doctors that tried to remove him and treated her when they were children, plus their biological mother who gave them up into the care of the medical facility.
Most of the film seems to be going for a relatively standard "paranormal" type horror setup - Emily/other characters/the audience glimpse Gabriel when the lights flicker (and text during the opening credits reveal he can somehow absorb and utilize electricity), he clearly has superhuman strength, Emily can hear his voice, but he also makes phone calls and speaks through the radio. It's revealed that Emily spoke to him throughout her childhood as an "imaginary friend", though she insisted he was real, and he tried to convince her to do horrible things. She claims that he's "the devil." As it starts to seem that the victims are related to her childhood, and that maybe she's somehow been involved, then it sort of veers closer to a "demonic possession" type story.
Buuuut it wants to subvert that and go for it being a physical thing rather than any sort of paranormal or demonic entity. The ultimate explanation is that Gabriel has been taking control over her body to commit the murders, and has been using their mental connection to make her *believe* that she was elsewhere, going about her normal life, while he was doing this. This sort of treads the line between "accidentally unreliable narrator" which is a thing I can enjoy, and "unfair mystery" which is a thing I don't.
More or less, I just couldn't ever suspend my disbelief enough to buy into the explanation.
There are still SOME paranormal aspects that it keeps as "real" - the superhuman strength, the never-explained "eating/absorbing electricity" thing (which I also hated for being inconsistent), the ability for Gabriel to speak through radios and cell phones... so I wish it would have just stuck with a fully paranormal explanation instead of what they went with.
Some earlier scenes don't make sense in light of the explanation, which in my opinion is what pushes it into that "unfair mystery" category, and makes this a BAD twist. I am of the VERY STRONG opinion that a good twist is one that casts the rest of the work in a new light once the twist has been revealed. This does the opposite - it makes earlier scenes into plot holes.
One of the better creepy scenes (imo) is very early in the movie (and was also in the trailer), which is where the abusive husband walks into a dim room lit only by the static on the TV, and sees "Emily" on the couch. But as soon as he turns on the light, she vanishes, but the camera pans to the couch cushion, and it shifts like there's something sitting on it.
...except this isn't something being "shown" to Emily as a false memory; it's from the husband's perspective, so it makes no sense if Gabriel is a purely physical entity in Emily's body.
There's no indication given that Emily truly has any special healing abilities - in fact, the wound on her head keeps breaking open and bleeding. This is revealed to be because Gabriel is LITERALLY breaking through her skull, and then just... closing it back up? But he also snaps all her joints out of place so that he can use her body while facing "forward" out the back of her head (which is why the physical actress was actually moving backwards)... and somehow she was never even slightly sore from having all her joints dislocated and snapped back in. Maybe we're supposed to assume she's super great at healing or doesn't feel much pain... except the first scene we see her in is her coming home early from work because her back hurts so badly during an advanced pregnancy. (This is absolutely nitpicky, and is the kind of thing I would happily ignore if everything else made sense, or if it had been given an explanation, but... it just added to the things that bothered me.)
As much as I mostly liked the practical effects, a couple of the later "fight scenes" when Gabriel took control and decided to fight the whole police precinct came across as comical, ridiculous over the top action scenes in a way I don't think they were intended to.
The dramatic emotional moments ALSO often made me try not to laugh. I don't think any of the cast were bad, I just really couldn't buy in to the big, heartfelt "I may be adopted, but you're my REAL family" speeches.
(AND ANOTHER THING: The adoption didn't seem to be a secret... except from her sister (the younger bio daughter of Emily's adoptive parents.) It's a specific scene where Emily gives her an "I want to be a mother because I've always wanted to know what it's like to be related by blood to someone... because... I'M ADOPTED!" speech. But her mom isn't surprised or upset by Emily coming to later ask about the adoption. It gave it kind of a weird tonal inconsistency regarding that.)
And dear god, I feel like I could go decades without seeing another "female protagonist of a horror movie is primarily motivated by childbirth/miscarriage/infertility" and they would STILL be overrepresented. It's not that those AREN'T big themes that feature in many people's lives, or aren't a very real-life source of fear and anxiety, or that there aren't movies that explore those themes well, but it seems like it's frequently lazy shorthand for character motivation. Emily does have a miscarriage early on, after the first time Gabriel attacks, and it's stated that it's happened to her multiple times before. Considering that part of the plot is that she and Gabriel were given up by their unwed teenage mother, it's not totally unrelated to the rest of the story, but... the thing that finally seems to give her the strength to wrest control back from Gabriel is her sister telling her that Gabriel is responsible for her miscarriages because he was absorbing the fetuses to gain strength. Which... comes out of nowhere, because we'd just been told that he "woke up" when her husband threw her into a wall, so it doesn't seem like he was aware enough previously to do something like that, and also, fucking how, when their only point of connection is the brainstem? And I frankly hated that being her ~truest~ motivation and strength.
Closing thoughts:
If the movie had wanted to go for the "body-horror over-the-top monster mutation" thing, then it should have gone for that. If it wanted to be a "creepy paranormal murder-mystery evil entity" thing, it should have gone for that. And as much as I sometimes enjoy genre and subgenre mashups, this particular blend it went for did not work at all for me.
The best aspects were, imo, the visuals... and for the melting room visuals (plus explorations of motherhood/adoption/being the victim of a past you weren't a willing participant in/possession-but-not) I'd rather watch the Silent Hill movie again.
And for the best scenes of Gabriel seeming to flicker in and out of existence with the light, and one of the murder victims lit by neon lights outside his window, plus a murderous creature from a character's past, I'd way rather watch Lights Out again. (Not as big a fan of how that one was a "this monster is a manifestation of someone's mental illness", but overall I really enjoyed it. And to be honest, the more I think about this one, the more it seems like all the aspects I did enjoy were completely lifted from that movie.)
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Good luck finding better horror to watch. I think I am going to skip trying new things and just do a Cabin in the Woods rewatch
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Out of the last four horror movies we've seen in theaters, we're 2 and 2 for good vs. bad. I liked Candyman and The Night House, and Don't Breathe 2 and this one were garbage, lol.
I feel like I have a pretty high tolerance for weirdness in my horror, so it surprised me how much I hated this one, especially because so many people had said it was really good.
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Yeah. Chimerism can happen but conjoined is when identicals don't fully split. Anyway, I assume poor twin science was the least of the problems. That just jumped out at me because I've known a lot of twins and have some in the family.
Right now I am just watching Conjuring and another Lorraine Warren based films. I am sort of interested in her impact on horror. So, it's not a total loss if the film sucks.
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Yeah, the poor twin science was annoying, since that was the mechanic that the entire (bad) premise rested on. The premise itself was probably a worse flaw, imo, but it was just... bad all the way down.
I liked the Conjuring movies pretty well (even though the Warrens were at least mostly probably full of shit, considering some of the debunkings and later admissions of people who claim to have been in on the hoaxes.) The cases are still genuinely interesting though, and as works of fiction, I enjoy them a lot.
(With the exception of The Nun, which I think could have been a much better movie if they just hadn't had a prologue section. Instead, the prologue spoils the rest of the movie, rendering all the info the characters are desperately trying to find and understand... completely unsurprising.)
(And I think the Annabelle films would have been creepier if they'd stuck with the "real" doll, which was a Raggedy Anne doll, or something else cutesy if there were copyright issues or something. Instead they picked a doll design that is so clearly INTENDED to look evil, I don't know why anyone would want to keep the damn thing, so there's no creepy disconnect/juxtaposition of cute doll/evil entity. Just "oh yeah, that thing is possessed as shit.")
I may go with your original suggestion and watch Cabin in the Woods again, lol. That's always a genuinely good time.
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Honestly, I would have loved to go to their museum! It's a shame you didn't know about it when you were in the area.
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There is no connection between them and Poltergeist that I can find, but I can't help but think that the movie has that same 'shape' with a the exorcist who operates outside of the church.
One of my Origfic ideas that I've been developing involves taking a bunch of paranormal artifacts and concentrating them all in the same place being a bad idea. Allegedly, Lorraine's spiritual power helped keep them under control, but she's passed on now. The world changes.
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I don't think there is a connection, at least not that I'm aware of. But it's true that it's a very similar "shape." The Exorcist came out in 1973, the Warrens investigated Amityville in 1976, the book was published in 1977, the first Amityville Horror film came out in 1979 (which was when more info about the Warren's investigation came out), and then Poltergeist was in 1982. I can definitely see some clear influence, even if there's not a direct connection!
(Poltergeist is the one horror movie that terrified me as a too-young kid. The scene of him going into the bathroom and then tearing at his face as it starts to bleed kept me scared of mirrors in the dark for DECADES.)
Oooh, I like that idea for a story! That's an excellent plot hook, because... yeah, if it was their good spiritual power/religious faith helping to keep these things from being able to hurt anyone... then what now? Having them all in one place seems like a great way to get super-mega-ultra possessed or cursed, lol.
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It's weird how info moved pre-internet. Like, I never knew about the Warrens but I 100% knew about the Elan School and how they ... brought the kids in. (If you don't know, it's a lot. You may or may not want to google that.) I just recently found out that the Elan School info wasn't really public knowledge until people collabed on reddit. New England is weird and scary sometimes.
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I do remember reading a little bit on the Elan School, though I think in combination with other schools and care facilities that had similar stories of abuse, and that was probably within the last few years. I definitely hadn't heard of it when I was young.
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Being in an area where that actively happened locally seems like the kind of thing that would be even worse.
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Good point, a couple of areas besides mine also had kids snatched for being non-compliant. Honestly, I think it formed some of my ideas/fears more than I realized.
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