MANILA, PHILIPPINES — Before he brought Jason Momoa’s undersea adventures to the world in Aquaman, director James Wan first gained fame as a director in the horror genre. He directed Saw and Insidious, as well as The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2. While he also stepped out of his comfort zone to direct Furious 7 from The Fast and The Furious series and is already working on the Aquaman sequel, by sheer volume, it’s safe to say that Wan has been the most comfortable in horror.
So, when it was announced that Wan would be directing his first horror movie in eight years, fans of the genre took notice and the result is the creepy and uncomfortable thriller that is Malignant.
At the Simion Research Hospital in 1993, Dr. Florence Weaver (Jacqueline McKenzie) and her colleagues are treating psychiatric patient Gabriel. Shown as a small, unhuman figure in silhouette, Gabriel somehow controls electricity and broadcasts his thoughts via audio speakers. One night, Gabriel goes on a killing spree and lays waste to several hospital staff members.
Twenty-seven years later in Seattle, Madison Lake (Annabelle Wallis) is pregnant and heads home after feeling ill at work. In an argument with her husband Derek Mitchell (Jake Abel), Derek turns violent and smashes Madison’s head into a wall. Falling asleep after locking herself in a bathroom, Madison awakes to find Derek’s body.
Madison had dreamed that a man had entered their home and killed her husband. To her shock, the killer is still in the house and knocks Madison unconscious. When she wakes next, Madison is in the hospital and her sister, Sydney (Maddie Hasson), informs her that the baby she was carrying did not survive.
Police detectives Kekoa Shaw (George Young) and Regina Moss (Michole Briana White) interview Madison about the attacks before letting her go home. After revealing to Sydney that she was adopted at eight-years-old and that her birthname was Emily May, Madison dreams that the killer has attacked Dr. Weaver. Shaw and Moss conduct their investigation into Weaver’s death and discover a photo of Madison as a child.
When Madison has another vision, this time of the killer going after one of Weaver’s colleagues, the sisters contact the police. The killer then reveals himself to Madison as Gabriel, someone who she thought was an imaginary friend when she was a child. The girls proceed to visit their mother, Jeanne (Susanna Thompson) and learn that Madison’s history with Gabriel is far more sinister and twisted than she could have imagined.
For fans of Annabelle Wallis, most are familiar with her turn as the Irish spy Grace Burgess in the BBC drama Peaky Blinders. She also starred in the two Annabelle films that Wan produced. Thus, Wallis already had some experience in horror prior to this film. In Malignant, however, Wallis might not have expected how involved she would be in the action scenes, however, particularly after the big reveal is made near the film’s end.
That reveal will more than likely be what the audience will be talking about Malignant in years to come because it is so unexpected, so twisted, and so gruesome, it will undoubtedly leave people’s collective jaws on the floor. The extreme form of a teratoma that is Gabriel, sharing a brain and spinal cord as Madison, looks as gross as you would expect, if not worse. The visual of Gabriel popping out of the back of Madison’s head and twisting her arms and legs to propel himself forward is the stuff of nightmares.
Of course, it involves a lot of stretching of the imagination but Malignant never claimed to be based in fact or reality. The story by Wan, wife Ingrid Bisu, and Akela Cooper resulting in a screenplay by Cooper takes some time to get to that big revelation, and that is perhaps the biggest weakness of the film.
The parts where Madison “dreams” about Gabriel’s killings are well-executed through computer-generated graphics and transitions as she truly believes that she is seeing things outside her own body. When the truth about their situation is eventually shown, it makes Madison feel all the more helpless to defend herself and take control of this body that Gabriel has taken over.
With Malignant, Wan clearly adds to his mastery of horror storytelling that he has established in his earlier work. It’s pretty amazing that it took him eight years to return to the genre, preferring to try his hand out with superheroes, writing, and producing. Yet when Wan is behind the camera and in control of the story, he can truly cut loose and bring the audience to places where they are definitely not comfortable in.
As outlandish and unbelievable as the premise of Malignant is, fans of horror and scary movies will not be disappointed with the execution and the way Wan presents it.
