Greg and Zanna review a movie that cuts a bit close to the bone.
SCORES
Horror: 5
Comedy: 5
Excitement at sight of local landmarks : 5
M3GAN is the horror comedy event of the year
M3GAN and Cady (Violet McGraw) in M3GAN.
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SHE SAW
New year, new me: I practically begged Greg to review a horror film this week and not just because it got me two hours child-free at the cinema during peak school holiday ennui. The relatively low-budget movie M3GAN has been all over everything since its release this month. Directed by New Zealander Gerard Johnstone and filmed here in Tāmaki Makaurau, it was our duty to get hip to that crazy-eyed doll.
I hate horror films. I’m an enormous scaredy cat who’s had three children – there are involuntary physical consequences to me jumping with terror - so the afternoon screening was ideal. No intelligent algorithm would recommend this film for me and yet I found it fun, funny and ridiculous in the way good horrors often are.
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The film stars Allison Williams (Girls, Get Out), who looks quite a bit like an American Girl doll herself, as a toy designer who unexpectedly gets custody of her 9-year-old niece in the wake of her sister and brother-in-law’s deaths. In an attempt to help her niece cope with grief and avoid having to deal with it herself, she builds a life-size AI doll called M3GAN to be her friend.
What happens next isn’t original – we’ve all seen Child’s Play and done some light catastrophising about AI going rogue – but it’s done well and strikes a nice balance between legitimate scares and tongue-in-cheek humour.
M3GAN, the doll, is pretty silly looking. She’s played in body by a combination of an animatronic puppet and New Zealand dancer, Amie Donald who was 10 at the time of filming, but she’s voiced by Jenna Davis – a teen country music sensation who showed up in my Spotify wrapped last year thanks to my 7-year-old.
The fact that M3GAN’s body moves like a human but her face looks like it’s made out of a silicone muffin tray with creepy camera lens eyes is wonderfully nonsensical.
It’s as absurd as her randomly launching into choreography during the final violent rampage. It seems pretty clear that “the M3GAN dance”, as it’s been dubbed, was a calculated marketing ploy to get the film all over social media and it has worked brilliantly.
There’s a lot that could be explored thematically in M3GAN - grief, modern parenting, the future of technology – but I’m not sure this film has that much to say about any of those things. It’s just not that deep.
What it is, is the perfect teen date movie, an ideal watch for a 15th birthday party sleepover and a film ripe for midnight cult classic screenings.
HE SAW
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It feels like this movie is going to be big, surprisingly big, big in a real and enduring way.
People will quote it and re-enact it for years to come. Something will happen in their real lives in five years and they’ll laugh and say “Oh, that reminds me of this thing that happened in M3GAN!”
It will last and last, and eventually become part of the culture. Not the dance though. That won’t survive the month.
The dance, if you haven’t already seen it, presumably because you’re dead, is a very brief, extremely ridiculous piece of choreography, and because it serves no purpose in the movie, it seems to exist primarily for purposes of marketing, at which it’s been extremely successful because I’ve already seen 500 versions of it on social media.
The gratuitous dance marketing aside, M3GAN is a note-perfect genre film. Funny and smart and made in New Zealand by a NZ director, it’s everything you’re looking for in a socially satirical horror comedy.
Allison Williams is perfectly cast in the lead human role of Gemma. As in her career-defining role as Marnie in Girls, she is both self-serious and emotionally stunted, and she provides the perfect contrast to the murderously comic mayhem of the unhinged robot child M3GAN.
Although M3GAN is an unredeemed psychopath, there’s nevertheless something sweet about her apparent belief she’s killing for good. Her beliefs, of course, are not things we can attribute to her, because she’s a hard drive covered in silicone.
Who is responsible for her actions, the movie asks. That there are no easy answers is the point.
The movie is a warning about the power of AI that feels scarily real. Already, the workings of algorithmic systems in everyday use are far beyond the capability of their creators to understand and/or control, and as machine learning becomes more prevalent and powerful, it’s increasingly difficult to even imagine the possibilities.
But there’s one possibility we don’t have to imagine, because it’s already here. It’s called ChatGPT and it gets better every day and I thought about it roughly every 30 seconds for the duration of the movie.
What really scares me about it is this: I could assure you that ChatGPT didn’t write this review, but so could ChatGPT, and I couldn’t guarantee you that my assurance would be more convincing.
M3GAN is in cinemas now.
