The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D-
James Wan has taken a break from mega blockbusters to return to his horror roots and proves that he has greater versatility than just making mediocre haunted house movies; he can also make terrible giallo movies. Malignant begins in a similar vein as Wan’s The Conjuring and Insidious, but quickly goes off the frigging rails with terrible special effects and a plot twist that is somehow both predictable and preposterous at the same time. I’m going to get into spoilers in a bit (and will put a spoiler warning beforehand) because I can’t discuss the true silliness of this film without giving away the twist.
As a quick explanatory note, “giallo” is a subgenre of Italian cinema that became popular in the 60s and 70s. A giallo film is basically halfway between a detective story and a slasher film and the genre was an enormous influence on the modern slasher movie. The word “giallo” literally translates to “yellow,” a reference to the yellow covers of paperback detective novels that were popular in Italy at the time. If you want to sample a definitive example of the genre, check out Dario Argento’s Deep Red. If you would like an American take on it, watch Alfred Sole’s Alice, Sweet Alice. Although it doesn’t exactly fit the mold, Seven is probably the closest thing to a giallo that casual viewers are likely to be familiar with.
We begin in a psychiatric hospital in 1993, where a hospital staff are treating a psychotic patient named Gabriel that can project his thoughts over the radio (this isn’t explained, which becomes important later). Gabriel goes crazy one night and kills a bunch of the doctors. Flash forward to 2020 and our main character is a pregnant woman named Madison who has her head slammed against the wall by her drunken asshole of a husband. Somebody breaks into the house and kills the husband and attacks Madison, who wakes up in the hospital to find out that she had a miscarriage. Madison then starts having visions of the doctors from the opening scene being killed by the same person that killed her husband. Those visions turn out to be reality as the doctors turn up dead in real life.
The early stages of the film feel like a haunted house story, which isn’t surprising given Wan’s background. These earlier scenes also showcase why I consider Wan to be one of the most overrated directors in the history of the genre, as any attempt at mood or atmosphere is abandoned in favor of cheap jump scares and jarring noises. There is a particular scene that pretty much summarizes my issues with Wan’s handling of this kind of material: Madison sees a ghostly figure sitting on a couch and the figure disappears. There is then a shot of the seat cushion slowly rising as if somebody was sitting and is now standing up. In a great haunted house movie, like The Haunting or The Changeling, the rising cushion would simply be in the frame and the eyes of the audience would be drawn to it by the framing of the shot. There wouldn’t be a stinger sound or anything, just a well-done, creepy shot. But this is a James Wan movie, so the initial shot is followed by a closeup shot of the cushion rising accompanied by a loud noise to make damn sure that you see it and you are aware that this is supposed to be creepy. It’s completely unnecessary, ruins any impact that the moment could have had and assumes that you, the viewer, are a fucking moron. That is James Wan in a nutshell.
As the film transitioned into a giallo/slasher movie, I found myself wondering why I read so much praise for the twist of the film. Maybe I have just seen too many movies like this (though I would hope that professional movie critics would also suffer from this condition), but I knew who the killer was in the first half hour. I didn’t exactly know the how and why, but I did know the who (the details were a bit too stupid for me to figure out). I won’t get into details until the spoilers section, but this is a problem in a mystery story.
The film does become surprisingly bloody in the last act, but the horrible special effects make the gore more laughable than shocking. I know that I harp on computer effects a lot, but holy shit does this look ridiculous. There are sequences that look like a Mortal Kombat cutscene, as the actual actors are suddenly replaced by a computer-generated killer that suddenly knows karate and slashes through multiple computer-generated characters that spew computer-generated blood all over the place. It’s fucking jarring to watch a movie essentially switch from live-action to computer animation and I just sat there wondering how exactly I was supposed to be taking this seriously. Why couldn’t they just use actual fake blood? Is there a fucking shortage? It’s fucking corn syrup and red dye, you fucking lazy fucks. Also, why couldn’t they scale down the scenes so that the killer slowly kills a few people rather than quickly kill a dozen people? Why does this occasionally turn into a frigging kung fu video game?
Alright, it’s time to really bite into this shit sandwich and get into SPOILERS……Madison is the killer. Or, more specifically, her Siamese twin named Gabriel is the killer. As a child, she had a partial twin growing out the back of her head that had a tumor attached to it. The doctors in 1993 removed the tumor and crammed what was left of Gabriel back into Madison’s skull. When her shitbag husband hit her head against a wall, it woke up Gabriel, who now bursts forth from the back of Madison’s skull, she contorts her body in reverse and goes off stabbing folks. For fans of Tales from the Crypt, it’s basically the episode called About Face.
This raises so many questions. How did Gabriel project his thoughts over the radio? How did he make phone calls when Madison was in the room? How did he call Madison? How did he attack Madison? Why is he a ninja that is seemingly training for a parkour championship? How does Madison manage to
break every bone in her body when Gabriel takes over so that the back of her head is now the front, but she is then perfectly fine? How did she, as a little girl in 1993, go on that rampage in the hospital? None of this makes sense under the least bit of scrutiny, as if the filmmakers were so proud of this twist that they forgot to engineer the film around it so that it would actually make sense.
Rarely is a film both this predictable and illogical, but Malignant found a way. The haunted house bits suffer from Wan’s usual sledgehammer-like sensibilities, the giallo bits are ruined by awful effects and the final twist worked a lot better on Tales from the Crypt. There are several moments here when Wan wants to make it clear that he has seen Deep Red, so I suggest that audiences take his advice and just watch Deep Red instead.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malignant_(2021_film)#/media/File:Malignant2021poster.jpg
