I do love a good horror movie. But, to be honest, most horror movies aren’t particularly good. Let's see if Malignant makes the cut. Malignant is the new horror movie on HBO Max, from successful horror filmmaker, James Wan (The Conjuring, Saw, Aquaman).
What’s it About?
The movie starts with a fairly typical horror movie backstory, with a scene in an asylum where a dangerous patient (who is largely unseen, but who appears to be a child) kills several staff members before being sedated by the doctor in charge. She scolds the ‘child’ named Gabriel who communicates through radio waves and says it’s time to ‘cut out the cancer.’
We then jump to the present day and meet Madison, a young woman in an abusive marriage, who is also pregnant. She gets in an altercation with her husband and locks him out of their bedroom after taking a serious blow to the head. During the night, her husband is murdered by some dark entity in the living room, while she is sleeping upstairs. The largely unseen creature attacks her as well, but only leaves her unconscious. She wakes up in the hospital, to learn her husband is dead and she has lost the baby.
The police begin investigating, suspecting Madison of killing her husband, possibly in self-defense. Meanwhile, the entity begins attacking other people, and each time it does, Madison has visions of the murders. She eventually goes to the police to report the visions, and they are able to corroborate another murder from her visions.
We learn that the entity is attacking people who worked at the asylum from the opening scene and it appears to be the grown-up version of the child, Gabriel, as he still communicates through radios and now cell phones.
The story begins to unveil things about Gabriel and Madison, that are meant to be surprising, but any horror fan should start to get the idea of what is happening fairly early on.
Shades of Stephen King
Pretty early on, I started suspecting that Gabriel is Madison’s twin brother or at least some piece of him that was still inside Madison as a little girl (hence the cutting out the cancer line). This really reminded me of the book, The Dark Half, by Stephen King, where a twin brother’s consciousness existed inside his twin, as a sort of cancerous tumor.
Madison starts remembering Gabriel, first as an ‘imaginary’ friend her parents thought she had as a way of dealing with childhood trauma. Eventually, we learn that Madison was born Emily, but ended up in the asylum with mental issues as a young girl. She was later adopted and given the name Madison, largely forgetting her previous life.
Gabriel’s killing spree continues, as he seeks out every member of the medical team at the asylum, with Madison/Emily seeing the killings as they occur. One of the detectives arrives at a murder scene as it’s happening and confronts Gabriel, who we get a decent look at for the first time. His face is disfigured and almost ‘tumorous’ and he has long dark hair (like Madison) mostly obscuring his face, and a build very similar to Madison (Hmmmmmm). And, is it just me, or does he seem to be moving oddly, almost like he’s moving backward sometimes? We also learn the detective is a terrible shot and that there are some seriously creepy basements in Seattle, with mist on the floors and old horse-drawn carriages (huh?). But, at least the police have now seen the killer and it sure doesn’t look like Madison/Emily… Well, not so much since it turns out Gabriel has been keeping a victim tied up in Madison’s attic! This pretty much decides it for the police, as they arrest Madison and accuse her of being the killer once they find all of Gabriel’s murder implements up in that attic.
The Reveal!
I’ll cut to the chase on Malignant. Gabriel is still inside Madison! Let’s say the reveal is pretty gruesome. And, I’ll let you watch the movie to see how it ends.
Watch or Not?
The answer really depends. Malignant isn’t a particularly original or high-quality horror movie (to me anyway). The reveal is totally nuts, but I still saw it coming. So, if this sounds like a horror movie that is up your alley, give it a shot. But, it won’t be going on my list of great horror flicks.
