In the Flesh: Malignant

Malignant looks pretty good for a James Wan flick, which is to say it resembles a modestly ambitious episode of CSI — the original series, not the Florida one with David Caruso. Lighting is uniformly blue-gray, blood is shoddily CGI’d in, and every set looks like part of the same Holiday Inn. It has a few of Wan’s beloved wonky comic book angles, a touch of delightfully gonzo monster design, and a single fair to middling synth track it plows into the ground like Wile E. Coyote attempting to tunnel his way to the Road Runner only to discover he’s dug straight through the bottom of a canyon overhang. Alas. Nothing but empty air to be found. Malignant’s fundamental laziness kneecaps even the minimal personality Wan typically brings to his work. The script — replete with fumbles like “she’s a tough old bird, but she fought to the end” and “If she’s wrong you can have her committed, and slap the handcuffs on me” — is jaw-droppingly terrible, beyond even the scope of the film’s mildly parodic tone.

The cast is the usual ensemble of catalog models, headed by Annabelle Wallis in the role of a sort of bargain bin Evangeline Lily — herself a poor man’s Jessica Biel — and rounded out by a great many others, all of whom look like depressed wax in the film’s hideous lighting scheme. Wan’s idea of the inside of a jail cell is simultaneously the looniest and most boring interpretation of said liminal space I’ve ever seen, a completely bare fluorescent-lit concrete cube populated by weathered, predatory dykes and what appear to be a selection of aggressive sex workers from the 1970s. At no point in Malignant’s hour-and-forty-minute running time does a human being utter a believable line or look like a person you might see in your life, but nor is their ever so slightly heightened reality particularly funny or gonzo or interesting to look at.

The parasitic entity around which the film revolves — malignant not medically speaking, but morally — is its one halfway decent asset. The sheer bizarre grotesquery of the thing, a vaginal slit in the back of a human head through which a clot of twisted features, including eyes which clench like anuses rather than blink, mired in tomato sauce-like biomass snarls and gibbers — is enough to make its onscreen presence captivating, even when Wan insists on plopping it inertly in front of us in a ridiculous leather jacket and gloves ensemble like something out of Van Helsing. It’s at its best when half-seen and creeping through the shadows, its lank hair flopping wildly, its limbs twisting and convulsing through impossible positions. That its motivations and back story come to more or less nothing is more or less an inevitability, but the thing itself is worth a look, if not the bland, soggy movie around it.