M3GAN Review

Plot: A robotics engineer at a toy company builds a life-like doll that begins to take on a life of its own.

Film: M3GAN

Director: Gerard Johnstone

Writers: Akela Cooper and James Wan

Starring: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis

I feel like we’ve seen this film in a variety of flavours over the years, with Childs Play, Annabelle and The Boy to name a few. Like with a lot of their projects, Blumhouse are modernising the horror genre to keep up with advancing technology and have given us an AI doll instead of the old evil-possessed-doll trope, which I really liked. I think the set up for this film is strong in general, I was invested in the characters quite early, Cady (Violet McGraw) is taken in by her Aunt Gemma (Allison Williams) when her parents are killed in a car accident, millennial Gemma has zero interest in raising children but works for a toy company and has toys all over the house but they’re collectables, so Cady cannot touch, it felt very real. Then all of Gemma’s problems are solved when she gifts her niece with a prototype AI doll that she’s been working on. Enter M3GAN (Amie Donald/Jenna Davis). 

I have to say though, this film suffered from a fatal case of ‘the best part of the movie is in the trailer’. I’m referring of course to the scene where M3GAN chases Cady’s bully through the forest after scaring him half to death, when he ends up in the path of a truck on the road finishes him off. This whole sequence was true thriller and the physicality performed by the actress was perfectly creepy, but unfortunately, we had seen most of it in the trailer and while I still enjoyed watching it in its entirety, it went exactly how we knew it would. 

Something else I was disappointed by was the lack of gore. For a film likened to Child’s Play it was lacking basically any blood and most of the kill scenes (of which there are very few) seemed to happen just off camera. Jason Blum has given us varying levels of slasher over the last few years, I wasn’t expecting M3GAN to go full Michael Myers, but I was expecting something more graphic than Happy Death Day, which I don’t think this was. Casting a contortionist to play the killer is really what kept me invested, more of that in the horror genre please. 

Overall this was a decent watch for a Friday night at the movies with my sister and I’ll definitely see the next instalment, as M3GAN 2.0 has already been announced, but I don’t think I’d be in a hurry to watch this one again.