James Wan has a way with horror that is well documented, what with his envelop pushing work on the Saw franchise and of course those The Conjuring movies. Now he’s back to the genre that birthed his prolific filmmaking career—after a blockbuster horror hiatus making Fast Five and Aquaman—with a new breed of terror in the electrifying Malignant.
Annabelle Wallis (The Mummy, Annabella), no stranger to the James Wan universe, is right at home as a woman who is in an abusive relationship that will have the most consequential of actions that will permeate throughout the remainder of the entire terrific thrill ride. She portrays Madison Mitchel, a not-so-happily married woman who is married to a physically and psychologically abusive man. One night that all changes when an entity enters her life. What form, or what exactly what it is is the most supreme of mysteries and remains so under the film’s final moments of its final acts. No spoilers here!
Let’s just say that Wan has crafted a horror story that is both in your head and firmly on the screen. That is a difficult needle to thread. It’s a challenge to strike a chord that sits firmly in the middle of physical scares and mental ones and Wan is the wizard at doing such things. That is firmly on display throughout Malignant and what’s more, it’s also a mystery.
There is a detective on the case intrigue that plays out over a few hours that will have you guessing throughout. That is also rare in the horror milieu. The ability to weave a web of mysterious ongoings that are both supernatural and grounded in the reality of the world Wan created is a gift on full display with his latest.
The key to the entire thing is Wallis. She turns in a hurricane of a performance that has you simultaneously pulling for her and raising one eyebrow at the methods of her means of attacking her problems. She is challenged so much as an actress, and this is further proof that she is one of the finer thespians of her generation. I cannot wait to see what she does next. There are nuances to her turn as Madison that will have you questioning reality and what exactly that entails. Throughout it all, the actress is firmly in the character and never wavers from that commitment, despite the utter insanity and horror that swirl around her.
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The cinematography is as much of the element of the fear factor as anything else. The way Wan and his DP Michael Burgess has to light and frame certain scenes adds layers of fear to the overall narrative that one is not sure whether to marvel at the cinematic beautify of it or to sink into one’s seats in utter terror. At times it is a beautiful film to witness with its color palette, and on other occasions it can sink into a Se7en-type tone that is uneasy, to put it mildly.
The score by Joseph Bishara echoes the sentiment of every other aesthetic aspect of the entire production and was literally pitch-perfect. Bishara drains every ounce of sorrow meets a placating piercing terror and the result adds layers to the fear factor of Malignant.
It is bloody. It is violent. But what it has to say about siblings, family, what we make of family in this modern age… it all adds up to something that goes much deeper than your average slasher movie. This is a story about who we are as a family and what it means to be called family and those who may be left on the sidelines and the psychological effects on them.
Wan is a study as a filmmaker. Every single thing he does in every single frame is precisely on purpose. I wouldn’t be surprised if he is an enormous advocate of massive amounts of storyboards. What he achieves must require the utmost of planning in how it is executed to its fullest extent of extreme fear and dread.
One has to love a filmmaker that can take different genres of film and make it uniquely their own. Steven Spielberg is one. You can always tell when you are witnessing a Spielberg-directed film. Even though we are yet to see it, although wonderful we’re sure, his West Side Story is going to be something wholly unusually different—yet it will still be very much Spielbergian. The same can be said for Wan. What he brought to Furious 7 and Aquaman was a vision. It is one that is singular in mission and scope. But he possesses a priceless ability to return to his horror roots and scare the living daylights out of all of us in the most stylish and emotionally riveting of ways.
Grade: A-