M3GAN

This horror-comedy leans more heavily into the comedy than the horror – but the result is a film that’s far funnier than you might be expecting, and M3GAN herself earns her place as a horror movie icon.

Premise:  When she’s forced to take in her 8-year-old niece Cady (Violet McGraw) after her parents are killed in a car accident, toy designer Gemma (Allison Williams) struggles to connect with the withdrawn child.  So instead, Gemma introduces Cady to her latest prototype, an AI-powered child-sized android companion called the Model 3 Generative ANdroid, or M3GAN for short.

Review:

I don’t mind admitting when I’m wrong, and I’ll confess that when M3GAN was first released, I dismissed it as just being a Child's Play knock off.  But M3GAN is actually so much more than that – in fact, it’s quite light on the horror, and instead (in my opinion) works far better as a twisted dark comedy.

That’s not to say that it’s an overt horror–comedy in the vein of something like Shaun of the Dead, as M3GAN still plays with countless horror tropes, delivers jump scares a plenty, and adopts the overall tone and ambience of a horror film.  But the point is, it plays with the horror tropes, and its entire tone is playful and mischievous rather than out-and-out scary.  Even when the horror elements do come to the fore, they’re relatively light on gore, and the darkly comic tone is still more likely to put a smile on your face than it is to have you hiding behind the sofa.

“…so much funnier than I was expecting…”

The film is so much funnier than I was expecting – countless bits made me laugh out loud, and Akela Cooper’s witty script provides M3GAN with plenty of amusing one-liners (delivered with oodles of sass by Jenna Davis, M3GAN’s voice performer).  Director Gerard Johnstone does a great job of balancing the tone, walking along the knife edge between the horror and the comedy – with Allison Williams providing the drama as the reluctant and disinterested surrogate parent Gemma, and Ronny Chieng providing the comedy as her blinkered boss David.  I’m generally not a fan of (young) child actors, but here, Violet McGraw actually does a really good job of playing the emotionally withdrawn and difficult to read Cady.

Overall, this may be too tame for those who prefer their horror with buckets of blood, and too tense for the horror-phobes in the audience – but I had a blast with this movie, and now can’t wait to catch the announced M3GAN 2.0 when that comes out.