The marketing for the movie "M3gan" has leaned heavily on the unsettling spectacle of the title character. A four-foot-tall cyborg with huge doe eyes, a ratty wig, and the attire of a headmistress in a '50s melodrama. And it appears to be effective. More interest in "M3gan" has been generated by a promotional event featuring a half-dozen women dressed in M3gan drag there. It has received more attention than the previous five horror movies dumped into the theater landscape in early January. But there was another path the business may have taken. In case you missed it, the author of "Malignant" is the creator of this movie.
Akela Cooper, a veteran TV writer with a sideline in horror screenplays, wrote the script for the movie. It is under the direction of James Wan. When "Malignant" debuted on HBO Max in the fall of 2021, the pair expertly balanced its blend of absurd grotesquerie and haunted-house terror. Now that Cooper is a horror screenwriter who also writes for television, Blumhouse has recruited her. She did work on both the sequel to the "Conjuring", "The Nun" and "M3gan," which she and Wan co-wrote.
Like "Malignant," "M3gan" is aware of how absurd it is. It splashes around in a kiddie pool full of absurdity. Yet, Cooper's "M3gan" screenplay is more obviously humorous than "Malignant.” As a result, it has a more populist type of appeal. (The Chicago screening audience for the movie went nuts for it.) The theme includes the typical "science gone awry" material that is in films like "Frankenstein" and "Jurassic Park," but it also pairs with a more contemporary throughline that examines maternal worries and filters through the deliberately absurd prism of the "tiny terrors" subgenre. The most well-known example of that last category is "Child's Play," and many analogies between M3gan (an acronym for "Model 3 Generative Android") and Chucky can be drawn.
The movie begins with a scene in which Cady plays with an annoying Furby-like toy called a Purrpetual Pet in the backseat of a car, setting the tone for the rest of the movie's garish satire and impish morbidity. She and her parents are traveling to a ski lodge in Oregon for a winter holiday when, in a scene reminiscent of "Final Destination," a snow plow kills Cady's parents out of the blue. Flip to Seattle-based Funki, a high-tech toy firm where Gemma (Allison Williams) is an inventor. Now that her sister and brother-in-law are dead, Gemma is Cady's aunt and the child's legal guardian.
But Gemma isn't a motherly type. She's too busy with work to spend much time with Cady, for one. And although she works for a toy company, she keeps her toys-sorry, collectibles-in their boxes and on a shelf in her living room. But these two are now the only family the other one has. So they'll have to learn to live together, at least well enough to satisfy a court-ordered psychiatrist who's skeptical about Gemma's parenting abilities.
