Once the investigation begins and strange occurrences begin, this film doesn't hold back. Trying to tell people what this may be, causes quite the stir among the members of the Seattle Police Department. In the present day, Madison (Annabelle Wallis) continuously has visions of people being brutally murdered.

Malignant begins with a flashback to give some context as to what may be happening. That's also a hurdle of my own to get over, so I didn't let that seep into my enjoyment. For that reason alone, I wanted to roll my eyes when this film started. Honestly, even though it still works now and then, I've grown pretty tired of big, open houses being the setting of every horror film. Here's why, especially if you're a horror fan, Malignant is great. I was already planning on checking out Malignant when I heard it was his newest directorial effort, but I wasn't expecting just how different it would be from the rest of his horror work. I've enjoyed almost every single one of his movies, even including critically lukewarm ones like Death Sentence or Insidious: Chapter 2. He's one of the few mainstream horror filmmakers that hits way more than he misses. I wish I could have seen this in a packed theater pre-COVID.įrom Saw to Aquaman, or Insidious to Furious 7, James Wan has been a filmmaker I've always admired, especially when it comes to horror. However, you cannot watch this movie and have a passive response. I can understand people having trouble even making sense of Malignant. I can understand people loving Malignant. I can understand people hating Malignant. The deliberate asides, misdirects, and eventual revelations feel so purposeful to yank around the audience and deliver a frantic and unpredictable ride of a movie that leaves the audience screaming and howling with laughter. There's even a spooky abandoned child experiment-heavy hospital on a cliff, and rather than have something spooky happen, the character then safely arrives back home with an armload of incriminating medical VHS tapes. Night Shyamalan was trying to escape camp and kept falling back into its morass, Malignant feels expressly like the movie James Wan wishes to make. It acknowledges how goofy looking and bizarre its eventual monster looks, let alone the logistics and circumstances involved, and it all veers into that. Wan is clearly going for messy giallo horror camp and gives the audience permission to laugh along with the insanity. It's worth your time, but everything is in service to setting up the final act where it gets so much bigger, more bonkers, and deliriously more entertaining. Before its drunken rampage of schlocky delight, Malignant is a horror mystery and stylishly directed with some bravura shots and angles. However, from that point forward, Wan lays out all his cards and it's so absurd, so entrancingly weird, and so enthusiastic about all of it, that you may burst out laughing in the best possible way. For the first half of the movie, there's a lot to keep up with and it's easy to get confused with bland characters, their often baffling actions and decisions, and then it plops you down for heavy exposition via asylum VHS tapes. The movie begins feeling like high-end camp in a flashback, takes a very serious and uncomfortable turn into domestic violence and miscarriages, and then builds into a psychic serial killer investigation where our main character (Annabelle Wallis) is having creepy visions of the killer exacting bloody revenge. Malignant is a movie that starts slow, appearing to be another in the line of horror thrillers about a psychic connection between a troubled soul and the imaginary friend that seems to be coming back. The horror hit-maker has earned enough creative cache in the industry after fostering three separate horror franchises (totaling near two billion dollars), plus two other high-profile action superhero blockbusters, that he can do whatever he wants and thankfully what Wan wants to do is make really weird movies that take tremendous risks.

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