Movie Review: 'Malignant' from Director James Wan

Malignant stars Annabelle Wallis as Madison, a woman in an abusive relationship. When Madison returns home from work she gets into an argument with her husband, Derek (Jake Abel). He shoves Madison’s head into the wall hard enough to break the wall and cut Madison’s head open. He leaves, she locks him out of the bedroom and worries how his abuse might have affected her unborn child.

That night, Derek sleeps on the couch and is awakened by a strange presence in the house. This strange presence turns on the blender and then a radio, and the television. As Derek grows more and more annoyed with whatever is screwing with the electronics in the home, the presence finally leaps forward and snaps his spine, nearly tearing his head clean off, I think, the movie is so dark in this moment that all I could make out was the top of his twisted spine in a shape it should not be in.

Madison runs in and the presence disappears and Madison collapses to the ground. Waking up in the hospital, Madison’s sister, Sydney (Maddie Hasson), tells her that she lost the baby and Derek is dead. A police detective named Kekoa Shaw (George Young) comes to the hospital to interview Madison about what happened to her husband but she’s basically comatose. Sydney shoos the detective away but the two flirt a little in a subplot that goes nowhere.

After an unmentioned amount of time, Madison returns home but she’s plagued by strange visions. The electricity in the house keeps flaring up and making crackling noises while turning things on and off. One of these visions takes a truly terrifying turn as Madison finds herself glued to the floor of her bathroom while a terrifying being with no face murders an esteemed doctor, Dr. Florence Weaver (Jaqueline Mackenzie).

Lather, rinse, repeat, this scene as the killer makes Madison watch two more gruesome murders before Madison is arrested as the main suspect. Turns out that Madison’s real name is Emily and that as a child she was a patient of the three dead doctors. She’d been treated at a now defunct mental hospital for children set inside a gothic castle on the edge of the ocean, like most great mental hospitals catering to children.

Why was Emily/Madison there? How did she ever get released from this place? I’m not going to spoil it. I will respect those who wish to suffer the insulting waste of time that is James Wan’s latest exercise in tediously abusing horror tropes, but this time, with a twist. Malignant is all twist and zero substance. Without the outlandish and silly twist, Malignant is merely a derivative series of horror tropes enacted with about as much fun as a root canal.

I honestly wonder if James Wan continuously makes the same horror movies just to give work to his friends who are practicing making horror movie scores. Like, maybe one of James’ composer friends really wants to get into making horror movie scores and James is like, ‘well, I can slap a few jump scares together around a silly twist and use you to score it? You know, for practice.’ Wan’s movies, aside from Aquaman, an outlier on his resume, are exercises in toying with the same horror movie tropes over and over again all while the score pulses loudly announcing each and every scary moment, and occasionally filling in where James doesn’t have a scary visual.

In Malignant, one scene comes entirely down to the score doing all of the work. A character leading a tour of the Seattle underground is shutting off the lights to go home for the night when she hears a noise. Instead of turning the lights back on in order to seek out the source of the noise, the character walks into the darkness to shout commands to the unseen presence. It’s so dark that even if there were something in the distance, we’d never see it. So the score pipes up after she finally does turn the lights back on and takes care of the scary visual I assume would go here if James Wan was actually trying.

Maybe James Wan just like finding work for his friends. For instance, screenwriter and actress Ingrid Bisu, Wan's wife, is awkwardly shoehorned into Malignant as an entirely superfluous character. Bisu plays a CSI tech who tries and fails to flirt with Detective Shaw. She's weird and awkward and honestly kind of sweet and more interesting than the main two female characters. The only time in the movie I genuinely cared about one of the characters was when Bisu's character was hiding from the big bad who is on a rampage, killing cops left and right.

Ask yourself this if you are thinking of defending this lazy, derivative, nonsensical movie, why does the big bad have power over electricity? How is this power necessary? What does the big bad actually do with this power? If anything, having this power actually takes away from the overall power of the central narrative. So why is this electricity controlling power in the movie? Why does the big bad, Gabriel, as the character comes to be called, have to turn on a blender?

Malignant is now in theaters and available for subscribers of HBO MAX. It’s not worth your time to watch it, but James Wan could slap his name on anything vaguely in the horror genre and people will likely waste time watching it. That includes me but, at the very least, I get paid to watch this stuff and poke holes in it. I don’t understand why you watch it or are somehow capable of rationalizing your way into enjoying it.