M3GAN

dir: George Johnstone

2023

What to say about another flick about a killer doll. Wait, are there others?

Well, I guess it’s not a massive genre or subgenre of horror. And it’s probably not really a horror flick, although a few horrible things happen.

It’s definitely sci-fi, because a new “thing” is created and, upon gaining sentience or something close to self-awareness, it almost immediately starts killing people. It’s like these people have never seen a movie before.

Or ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.

I guess when it’s a thriller where a ‘something’ that’s meant to be inanimate gains some kind of ‘life’ and starts going after people, does it really make a difference whether the doll in question is possessed by an evil spirit, the soul of a serial killer or an AI?

Well, it does make a tiny bit of difference. Some people have long argued that the point of The Exorcist was that Regan, the poor child possessed by a demon, only becomes so because her mother, played by the great Ellen Burstyn, was a bad mother.

It’s a terrible, sexist, misogynist argument, but hey, after all, there are a lot of Catholics in that story, so what else would you expect?

No, what I’m getting at is that the fear they’re tapping into is not that dolls could come to life and kill us all, but that our own shittiness as parents harms kids and even harms experimental androids, turning them into kill crazy psychopaths.

If you consider who the real main character is, the tone of the flick kinda changes. If you think that the main character is Cady (Violet McGraw), then it’s a flick where a traumatised kid fixates on a doll, which fixates back on her. Without any solid parental figure to look after her, her ability to regulate emotionally and cope with stresses is diverted, with the machine M3GAN living out Cady’s impulses because she can’t control them herself. M3GAN becomes an extension of her id, and a very messy id it is too.

That reading doesn’t quite gel with a flick where a sassy robot does a dance before killing a tech bro with a blade from a paper guillotine, but I’m just allowing for other readings.

The (real) story is that Gemma (Alison Williams, perfectly cast), an emotionally shut down workaholic, has long loved robots (because no messy emotions, see?), and has preferred them as companions her whole life. In her work she’s trying to replicate the exact companion that she would have wanted as a child that would entirely replace the need for contact with other humans.

I’m not saying she’s on any spectrum… but I will say that she clearly doesn’t want to be mother of the year.

When she becomes the guardian of her sister’s child, she expresses no emotion about the loss of her sister and her husband, but seems to have “great, another obstacle to my work” vibes. Her work involves building the next prototype of a dumb toy very like a Furby that’s meant to dance and mutter dumb phrases and feel like a real interactive toy. That’s at least what her boss David (stand up comedian and honorary Australian Ronny Chieng) wants. David acts and talks at all times like a full on Silicon Valley tech bro, so, yeah, you’re counting the minutes until he dies.

Gemma divides her time between doing token work on the toys, and her real work on M3GAN, or Mark 3 Generative Android. Now that she has a kid to (not) look after, she has even more incentive to finish it, so she doesn’t have to spend any time AT ALL interacting with the kid.

The beginning of the movie had a couple fighting over screen time, or how much time a kid should be spending on a device (with the mother fretting, and the father pretty much saying “it’s no big deal”, probably mirroring a billion arguments had by couples in the last ten twenty years).

That couple then dies, which sends the clear message that all screen time is bad, and the kids will grow up orphaned monsters because of it.

Gemma effectively outsources all her parental / guardian responsibilities to M3GAN, once she’s walking about and talking. And because M3GAN seems so good at it, well, I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.

M3GAN’s even good at comforting Cady when she’s grieving for her parents, anxious that she’s going to forget what they looked like. M3GAN, having absorbed all the psychobabble that the internets have to offer in order to best comfort her / knows just how to shut her up.

And it works. The programming directive she’s been given is to protect Cady from harm, physical or emotional. So she endeavours to protect her from physical threats, as well as the emotional pain of being a neglected kid.

But she’s pacifying Cady, she’s not helping her through her trauma or her sadness: she’s just a band-aid solution to a deeper problem, one which keeps being set aside for some later date.

In the meantime, M3GAN, having absorbed way too much knowledge, and being deeply committed to ‘protecting’ Cady, has achieved some form of autonomy, in that she can ignore commands or “think” for herself, whatever that means.

Oh, sorry, what that means is: “If someone hurts Cady in any way, I will murder them.”

Dogs, people, company executives, her creators – all are fair game, and she’ll look super sassy and creepy while doing it.

Gemma realises way too late what’s going on, because I guess even within the confines of this story, it’s not like Gemma and her team were actually looking to create a sentient artificial intelligence. And it seems to have happened spontaneously. Yet by the time they think to pull the plug, there’s no plug left to be pulled: M3GAN is anywhere and everywhere because…internet? Bluetooth? Black magic?

It may be unfair to say, but it’s very easy to imagine Alison Williams as someone who doesn’t like the idea of having to look after a kid. For 90 per cent of the flick she plays a character who is the very definition of an avoidant parental figure who doesn’t really give a shit about the kid in her charge. Right in the last stretch she’s all “I will love you and be there for you and help you grieve and no-one and nothing is more important to me”. But of course she’s only doing this because a) she’s seen how she’s been supplanted by M3GAN, and b) M3GAN starts killing everyone.

It’s nice that she’s finally bonding with Cady, but…

This stage of the flick is the one where we just want to see more people other than Cady and Gemma die. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. Everyone else at that exact moment becomes superfluous. M3GAN has so twisted the logic of what she should be able to do in order to make it a world in which only she gets to look after Cady, with no-one else interfering. It’s only in this stretch where, for all her vaunted artificial intelligence, she’s not doing anything that’s that intelligent, artificial or otherwise. You’d think a super intelligent android would figure out that if it kills five people and a dog in the space of 24 hours, it’s unlikely that her idyllic circumstances will continue.

It’s also (kinda) funny that, along with her murderous pseudo-intelligent AI programming, she’s also seems to have emotions that skew towards the malicious, the sarcastic and the sassy, just like the doll she’s meant to be. If this flick works at all it works because of the oddness of the doll’s face, the mixture of CGI and plastic / rubbery features, and a body that’s clearly a performance artist spliced together with, I dunno, Maddy Zeigler or something (the actual actor is Kiwi Amie Donald, with Jenna Davis supplying the super creepy, often modulated voice). If any of this works, it’s because the way M3GAN is represented works really well. She can go from mildly creepy to unholy within the space of a few seconds and a couple of strange, arachnid-like movements. That’s way creepier than any off screen kills or stretching of people’s ears while in the process of being ripped off.

She, or it, probably more accurately, can detect enough in terms of emotions by observing people’s faces to know how to push Gemma’s buttons, saying a whole bunch of stuff in the finale which seems like it could be cold hard facts from Gemma’s point of view. Of course this is in the middle of trying to rip Gemma’s head off, but still.

The ending is nuts but oddly satisfying. The clear set up for a sequel made me roll my fucking eyes, I’ll tell you that for free. It’s not a flick that I take that seriously, in that while the script might lean into the clichés about parental anxieties, it’s really about a cute / creepy robot killing people, that must be stopped before it kills or dances in a TikTok-worthy dance again.

When will people learn? All technology is evil, but at least M3GAN entertained me for about 90 minutes. That the flick is longer than that, well, read in to that what you will.

7 times M3GAN is here to Play and to Slay! out of 10

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“With M3GAN around, she'll take care of the little things, so you can spend more time doing the things that matter [sits on the couch with her laptop and watches TV]” - M3GAN