HORROR MOVIE REVIEW: M3GAN

Horror, almost uniquely, has the ability to examine this strange and unsettling world we live in and ask questions that cut to the centre of how we experience it.....

​​M3GAN, however, asks a different question. M3GAN asks “what if a robot had a knife?”

M3GAN 
M3GAN is a marvel of artificial intelligence, a lifelike doll that's programmed to be a child's greatest companion and a parent's greatest ally. Designed by Gemma, a brilliant roboticist, M3GAN can listen, watch and learn as it plays the role of friend and teacher, playmate and protector. When Gemma becomes the unexpected caretaker of her 8-year-old niece, she decides to give the girl an M3GAN prototype, a decision that leads to unimaginable consequences.

Release date: 13 January 2023 (UK)
Director: Gerard Johnstone
Distributed by: Universal Pictures

A Horror Movie Review by Daniel Pietersen

Out of horror’s many facets the one that frightens me the most is when the mundane is made strange and uncanny.  The chair-stacking scene in Poltergeist, for example, chills me far more than the eventual manifestation of the entity that’s been tormenting the Freeling family. The sense of vulnerability created when the things we rely on as part of our daily lives start to turn against us is, for me, a far deeper form of fear than inexplicable events or indescribably monsters and, for better or worse, the list of those things is only getting longer. Longer and, crucially, more pervasive. There used to be a clear line between the animate and the inanimate but the tools we use today have their own form of agency and awareness, albeit a limited one. At least for now. Equally, the tools that used to be held quite literally at arm’s length are now worn on our bodies or, in the case of medical technology, implanted deep inside them. The mundane is now simultaneously and persistently uncanny as the division between us and our tools starts to blur and collapse. Even the language we use to describe modern technology has an eerie tinge to it; “the internet of things” implies that there are predatory, unknowable beings lurking in the noospheric mist that envelopes us all. We are haunted by the ghosts of digital presences and stalked by disembodied eyes that monitor our every move.

Horror, almost uniquely, has the ability to examine this strange and unsettling world we live in and ask questions that cut to the centre of how we experience it. What happens when we rely on our tools to such a degree that the boundary between tool and tool-wielder breaks down completely? How do we co-exist and communicate with other consciousnesses, other ways of being? What rights should creations enjoy and, going back to the question that Frankenstein raises in science fiction’s earliest days, what duty do creators have to their creations?

M3GAN, however, asks a different question. M3GAN asks “what if a robot had a knife?”


Admittedly, that’s a bit unfair to the film. M3GAN certainly wants us to think about our codependency with the things we create and how that relationship can sour. When eight-year-old Cady loses her parents in a freak snowplough incident she moves to live with her aunt Gemma who, in traditional IT genius fashion, is unable to manage the emotional turmoil bubbling inside both her and her niece. Luckily, Gemma as been working after-hours to develop M3GAN - a “Mark 3 Generative Android” that houses an advanced machine intelligence inside a doll-like body - who Cady can be paired with and, it is strongly implied, palmed off onto. The relationship between grief-stricken Cady and the eerily manipulative robot quickly spirals out of control and, like HAL9000 before her, M3GAN almost immediately decides that the most efficient way to protect Cady is to proactively eliminate any threat to her, no matter how slight. Mayhem ensues.

Or, more correctly, it doesn’t. It takes a good hour for M3GAN to really get into gear and, even when it does, it’s due to a sequence whose effectiveness is somewhat blunted by having been shown, almost in its entirety, in every advert for the film. In fact, the whole film feels blunted, watered down from a more spirited original, and here lies one of the core problems in a film which has a lot of problems; it’s often quite boring. Characters interrupt the narrative flow to explain what’s happening as we watch it happening - in an excruciating scene a child psychologist explains, at length, how Cady’s emotional bond with a lifelike doll might actually be a bad idea - and the film’s pacing is all over the place, leaking tension at every turn. Attempts to flesh out supporting characters comes across as clumsy - sycophantic PA Kurt is shown stealing highly confidential corporate secrets, simply by copying them from one folder to another, purely so M3GAN can taunt him about it - and even M3GAN’s inherent strangeness is repeatedly enforced by little more than having her stare into the middle-distance, gears whining quietly. Which brings us to the second core problem with the film; M3GAN herself simply isn’t that convincing. Ignoring the way in which the child-in-a-suit and animatronic/CGI versions of M3GAN are easily distinguishable she is neither near enough a real human to be truly uncanny nor inhuman enough to be outright disturbing. Even when she is given a few moments to shine - contorting her body into impossible shapes or triumphantly revealed as a heartless machine in the Hardware-inspired finale - they’re drowned out by her uninspired GlaDOS-meets-SHODAN vocal inflections and, I can hardly bring myself to remember it, an ear-mangling a capella performance of David Guetta’s ‘Titanium’. Even worse than this, in some ways, is that being a robot doesn’t really change the fact she’s just another petty and vindictive knife-wielding maniac in a genre over-saturated with knife-wielding maniacs. Even her genuinely remarkable abilities are used in wearisome ways; her wireless access to the sum of human knowledge allows her to show off and belittle rather than exercise any genuinely superhuman omniscience that might set her apart from the humans she comes to hate. Her robot-ness is reduced to little more than a gimmick, just another mask for a killer to hide behind.

Nothing about M3GAN is truly bad - the marketing sequence that replicates Boston Dynamic’s ad campaigns, for example, offers an amusingly self-aware nod to films like RoboCop and more of that absurd humour would’ve lifted the film massively - but as a whole it’s just not good enough. Not funny enough, not exciting enough, not scary enough. Its influences are too obvious and throughout the film’s overlong 100 minute duration there’s the lingering sense that the filmmakers wanted to do more with the concepts derived from those influences but, for unidentified reasons, pulled their punches. The film’s PG-13 rating (15 in the UK) reflects this and, rumour suggests, cuts were made to specifically achieve that rating after M3GAN’s dance routine went viral amongst teen viewers. Maybe my disappointment with M3GAN lies in that disconnect and I expected too much from what is ultimately a kids’ popcorn movie.
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That said, M3GAN has been spectacularly successful for a kids’ popcorn movie, already recouping its modest $12million budget tenfold. A sequel, with the predictably uninspired title of M3GAN 2.0, is already in production and, now we know what happens when a robot has a knife, maybe the next film will delve deeper and ask “what if a robot had a gun?”

DANIEL PIETERSEN

Daniel Pietersen is the editor of I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird Tales of R Murray Gilchrist, part of the British Library's Tales of the Weird series. He is also a regular contributor to publications like Dead Reckonings, Horror Homeroom and the Romancing the Gothic project, where he is a guest lecturer. Daniel lives in a very old house in a very old town and is slowly becoming very old himself.

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