In the Flesh: M3GAN

The evil doll is one of those hoary old archetypes of horror that, in spite of never having been pulled off as anything but campy fun, just won’t quit. Who’s genuinely scared of Chucky? Who still remembers Annabelle from those godawful Conjuring movies? M3GAN, the titular doll in Gerard Johnstone’s film of the same name, written by Akela Cooper, is fucking scary. She has a child’s face but fully adult body language and posture. Her eyes are beady little cameras, pupils constantly dilating and contracting. Her hands are lifeless silicone gloves. At night she sits immobile on her charging station, eyes vacant, head bowed, like something out of The Ring. When the actual carnage begins, first with M3GAN baiting and murdering a dog that bit her owner Cady (Violet McGraw), then with her tormenting and maiming Cady’s bully Brandon (Jack Cassidy) before driving him into the road where he’s run down by a car, her inhumanity becomes as frightening as her facsimile of human behavior and appearance. She moves with impossible fluidity, disregarding the imperatives of human anatomical structure. She runs like a chimp through the woods, knuckles pounding the dead leaves. During her confrontation with toy company CEO David (Ronny Chieng) she gyrates like something between a pole dancer and a hydraulic press.

Cooper’s script is tight and smart, funny enough to grease the film’s slide into nightmarish violence and twisted familial dynamics but without undercutting those same scares. There’s a Verhoeven-esque vein of mean-spirited satire running through M3GAN, first with soul-ablating commercials for horrid little Furby-esque abominations that fart and shit and later with the abhorrent greed and shortsightedness of David and his corporate cronies, whose plan to sell an untested robot to rich children is framed as some sort of act of tremendous, world-healing generosity. “Think of what M3GAN will be able to do for children all over the world,” he simpers in a promotional video heavily featuring Cady talking about the death of her parents. “Even the ones without dead parents.” There’s something really insightful in that cynical ugliness, an acknowledgement that toys are proxies for human interaction and that by making them more and more advanced and all-encompassing we’re encouraging ourselves to detach from adulthood, from humanity, from community. There’s also a strong throughline of the consequences of exposing young children to direct consumer marketing.

McGraw and Allison Williams, who plays her aunt Gemma, have a believably complex screen chemistry that pulls M3GAN from merely fun to truly compelling, and Amie Donald is skin-crawlingly great as the doll herself. A key to the film’s success is the script’s treatment of M3GAN as a character in her own right rather than just a source of one liners and gory murders. She has desires, goals, viewpoints, everything that the people around her possess. Her cruelty feels intentional, her desire to please and nurture Cady genuine, if warped and alien. When she talks about lobotomizing Gemma and then providing palliative care during her physical decline, there’s a sick combination of ruthless practicality and sadistic pleasure in her childlike chirp of a voice that might easily have come off as cheap vamping with a looser script or less committed vocal performance. M3GAN is a sharp and delightfully nasty little movie improved at every turn by expert craftsmanship and good, solid journeyman filmmaking.

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn't exist.