Directed by: Gerard Johnstone
Starring: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis, Ronny Chieng
Rated PG-13, 102 minutes
Last month, at the premiere of “M3GAN,” a horror flick about a murderous doll, eight dancers in matching costumes performed a bizarre dance for the cameras, hearkening back to similar choreography in the movie’s trailer. The performance attracted viral attention and internet buzz, and while it was an unusual publicity stunt (just as good publicity stunts should be), it was also absurd, revealing nothing new about the film it was intended to publicize. “M3GAN” seemed destined for little more than a dancing meme.
Well, the movie is out now, and the robot doll does indeed perform its strange dance, which makes just as much sense within context as it does without. But “M3GAN” is also more than its offbeat viral joke or its simple premise. Equal parts entertaining and thought-provoking, the movie reimagines the perennial debate over how much technology is healthy for us, instead asking how much humanity is healthy for technology.
The titular robot (an acronym for “Model 3 Generative ANdroid”) is a life-size doll equipped with AI that allows it to make conversation and develop a personality and, eventually, commit twisted acts of violence. Created by the toy designer Gemma (Allison Williams, “Get Out”) and gifted to her nine-year-old niece, Cady (Violet McGraw, “The Haunting of Hill House”), M3GAN is programmed to eliminate anything it deems a potential threat to the girl’s safety. As you might imagine, things go downhill fast.
Just as driverless cars and advanced chatbots represent the freshest horrors in the field of artificial intelligence, M3GAN’s sophisticated abilities represent a leap forward in the subgenre of horror movies about possessed toys, crossing over into sci-fi. Here is a murderous robot that can learn ill intent by observation, that can hack phones and corrupt files in the cloud, that can drive a car without seeing over the wheel. There are no evil spirits involved, no curses or ghosts, only code.
But M3GAN is also a doll, created for a child, and her most terrifying quality is her ability to satisfy Cady’s emotional needs better than people. Cady, orphaned after a car wreck and isolated from human tenderness, proves an easy target for M3GAN’s manipulations. In a scene arguably more disturbing than any of the murders or maulings, Cady lapses into hysterics because Gemma has taken the doll away. Screaming and crying, punching her aunt in the face, Cady has transformed completely, no longer the docile, gloomy girl we’ve seen, but suddenly feral. This is the power, terrific and terrible, of a perfect toy like M3GAN.
She’s almost more interesting than the humans. Gemma, for all her programming genius, has a husk of a personality, perpetually and painfully aloof. Played flatly by Allison Williams, Gemma shows more emotion when dealing with a neighbor’s misbehaving dog than she does discovering the evils committed by her own creation. The CEO of the toy company, David Lin (Ronny Chieng, “The Daily Show”), concerns himself only with money and, predictably, has no patience for safety protocols or extra tests. This banality among the movie’s principals (especially as contrasted with the lively M3GAN) provides the film’s most salient commentary. If robots ever really do rebel against us, it will happen with the usual quiet outrages—the stone-faced programmers waffling over ethics and running endless diagnostics, the CEOs looking the other way.
Of course, it’s not all grim prophecy and moral quandary. More than a sci-fi or horror film, “M3GAN” is a comedy. (Remember the dancing meme?) Peppered with one-liners and oddball supporting characters, as well as a particularly effective use of music, the movie is as entertaining as it is disturbing. It’s a fine effort from screenwriter Akela Cooper (“Malignant”), whose script is rich with incident and idiosyncratic humor, and director Gerard Johnstone (“Housebound”), who has made a movie of many disparate parts feel like more than their sum.
With all its strange components, the socio-technological commentary and the complicated grief of children and that ridiculous dance, “M3GAN” is an unlikely but welcome crowd-pleaser to lead off 2023. (Compared to the sweeping three-hour epics “Babylon” and “Avatar: The Way of Water,” also in theaters now, “M3GAN” is blissfully compact, too.) There may be many precedents for a movie like this—the “Child’s Play” series, certainly, but also “Pinocchio” and even “2001: A Space Odyssey”—but “M3GAN” stands at the crossroads of them all, winking in every direction.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 1/13/23.