They say the eyes are windows to the soul, which is why the most expressive anthropomorphic characters in cinema—E.T., Gollum, Wall-E—all sport wide, soulful peepers. But windows work both ways. In M3gan, the sly and spry new horror-comedy directed by Gerard Johnstone, the titular android gazes out into the world through a pair of delicate grey-blue irises, less concerned with comprehending her internal essence than with mapping her external environment. Her vision is rendered like that of an eerily empathetic cyborg—when she sees a person, she instantly analyzes their “Emotional State” and assigns quantitative ratings to various feelings (trust, joy, fear), like a talent scout grading an athlete—but she’s doing more than just gauging behavioral patterns. She is constantly downloading new data and feeding it into her processor, which means she’s learning, judging, evolving.
How, you might wonder, will such a creature ultimately regard our society? Then again, you might not wonder that, because if you’ve seen any previous entry in the child-doll subgenre of horror, you already know. Yet while M3gan’s predictable plotting rarely deviates from its predecessors’ silly and shrieky playbook, it is nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable diversion—smart, funny, and even a mite provocative.
It’s probably overreading M3gan to interpret it as a sociological warning—a treatise directed toward gynecologically able women who are less than thrilled at the prospect of child-rearing—but without doubt, one of the movie’s themes is the unfathomable difficulty of parenting. So learns Gemma (Allison Williams), a gifted programmer and toy developer—her recent triumph involved creating a line of “purrpetual petz,” crude talking furballs who fart when you feed them—whose workaholic routine is interrupted when she learns of the tragic death of her niece’s parents, thrusting her into the role of guardian for nine-year-old Cady (Violet McGraw). One of the film’s sources of humor—exploring just how woefully ill-equipped Gemma is to serve as a mother (when she first brings Cady home, her Alexa-like assistant immediately informs her that she has five new Tinder notifications)—is also one of its more rueful insights. When Cady rushes to play with the boxed toys on Gemma’s shelf, Gemma winces, worrying that her new charge is damaging her priceless collectibles. Later, when Cady asks Gemma to read her a bedtime story, she panics before realizing, “There’s an app for that.” If only she had someone else around to help out…
So it is with a mixture of motives—a mingling of selfishness and sincerity, alongside the usual corporate greed—that Gemma ramps up her long-running quest to finalize M3gan (pronounced “Megan,” duh), the four-foot-tall android who’s furnished with alabaster skin, an apparently inexhaustible supply of fabulous fashions (her brass-buttoned midnight-navy overcoat should flourish come Halloween), and a freakishly advanced learning module that definitely won’t cause any problems. M3gan’s exclusive function is to care for her “primary user,” which means she reminds Cady to flush the toilet, advises her on the merits of eating vegetables, and comforts her in times of loneliness. She is the consummate companion and helpmeet—a boon to Cady’s happiness, and a savior to Gemma’s precarious work-life balance. And those safety protocols that Gemma neglected to upload prior to launch? Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s nothing.
One of the shrewd decisions made by Johnstone and his screenwriter, Akela Cooper (who co-wrote the story with James Wan, reteaming after Malignant), is to ensure that M3gan’s design is insistently uncanny. Unlike Haley Joel Osment’s Pinocchio surrogate in A.I., M3gan—who is played by Amie Donald (accompanied by impressive synthetic effects) but voiced in a silky purr by Jenna Davis—can never be mistaken as anything other than a robot doll, and paradoxically, her artificiality renders her more realistic. “Oh Jesus Christ!” blurts a cheery camp counselor upon seeing M3gan’s plasticky head swivel toward her, and the reaction proves typical—utter shock, followed by amazement and admiration. M3gan’s plausibility is rooted in her inhumanity, and her inherent phoniness makes her more marketable. Who wouldn’t want an indefatigable assistant who caters to their kid’s every need, yet who doesn’t demand the financial investment or emotional care of a real child?
The best parts of M3gan examine how our favorite smiling android successfully ingratiates herself into her new family, even as her conduct grows increasingly erratic and disturbing. There’s a beautiful scene in which M3gan, unwittingly playing her part in a pitch session, consoles a weeping Cady by vowing to preserve one of the child’s memories in her databank for all time, a gesture that brings venal executives to tears. She’s thoughtful, she’s selfless, she’s charming! Yet she is also unnervingly vigilant in policing and eliminating perceived threats to her ward’s well-being. That neighbor’s dog whose bite is just as vicious as its bark? Weird, it just disappeared. That bully who taunts Cady in the woods? It’s hardly M3gan’s fault he stumbled into traffic.
These sequences of escalating mayhem are playful and satisfying—the sight of an ear slowly being ripped from a boy’s head is delightfully perverse—even as they also implicate Asimovian concerns of technological ethics. Is it possible for a robot to permanently defend one specific human without ever attacking others? What happens when the programmatic imperative to protect bleeds into the preemptive impulse to harm? And can a cyborg be trusted to consistently obey its masters even as its own computer—its brain, its agenda, its sense of self—continuously evolves?
M3gan teases these questions, but it isn’t all that interested in pursuing them with philosophical rigor. It does offer some intriguing commentary about the potential perils of technology—not in a shrilly prophetic “You’ve doomed us all!” sort of way, but with the wry recognition of just how deeply our species has come to rely on automated assistance. (It isn’t lost to me that, as I write this review, 10 feet to my left sits an Amazon Fire TV Cube, a literal black box designed to respond to my every verbal request.) Really, though, the movie is most invested in maximizing the chaotic possibilities of its delectable premise: What if a cute-looking robot doll became infused with the remorseless lethality of The Terminator?
Which is pretty fun, as far as it goes. As an action choreographer, Johnstone’s instincts are largely functional, but he enjoys (ahem) toying with M3gan’s capabilities—like Arnold before her, she’s skilled at misdirecting her quarry by mimicking others’ voices—and exploiting the ludicrous contrast between her docile appearance and her deadly intentions. There’s a suspenseful scene in the third act in which the powered-off M3gan is suspended from cables as her anxious captors rush to deactivate her; you just know that she’s about to raise hell, but you don’t quite know how or when, and Johnstone mines tension from her ostensible dormancy.
M3gan works better as a comedy and a think-piece than as a straightforward thriller; the best thing that can be said about its hectic, obligatory climax is that it isn’t terrible. (Naturally, the sharpest moment here is also the funniest: when M3gan and Gemma pause their frenzied grappling and simultaneously assure Cady, “We’re not fighting!”) It lacks the oppressive unease of Steven Soderbergh’s KIMI, and it’s too kitschy to generate the requisite dread of classic horror. Still, it manages to be both smart and unpretentious, and its cleverness complements its verve.
“What are you?” asks an awestruck, horrified incipient victim, to which M3gan responds, “I’ve been asking myself that same question.” That’s unsettling, but while M3gan itself isn’t especially complicated, it leans into its absurdities with admirable vigor. At one point during the haywire last act, for no discernible reason, M3gan starts dancing—an eye-popping shake-and-twirl en route to another bloody kill. No CPU in existence would ever dictate such irrational behavior, but M3gan’s code operates according to a different kind of governing mandate: Above all else, its primary objective is to entertain its audience.
Grade: B
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.