![]() These are twists that rather than get under the skin settle for tickling the funny bone. In this way, Malignant falls into the long line of empty calorie “twist endings” that define their movies for all the wrong reasons. As a story, Malignant isn’t really about anything else. It’s maximum splatter for minimal payoff. ![]() Wan and his co-writers-Ingrid Bisu and Akela Cooper-don’t appear to have anything to say after this other than “boo.” When Gabriel finally reveals himself in the film’s present timeline, it isn’t for anything as loaded as the image of a mother licking her newborn’s afterbirth before the eyes of a disgusted husband it is just so Gabriel can take over Madison’s body and brutally kill a bunch of other prisoners inside a jail cell. The revelation that Madison is attached to a deformed and malicious twin brother who hides, quite literally, inside her head appears to serve no purpose beyond the initial shock of seeing Gabriel crawling out of a little girl’s back like one of the grosser gags in a Troma film. Yet that twist and that image are ends unto themselves, divorced from any sort of significant meaning or depth. Like the Cronenberg movie, Wan’s film pivots on a shocking twist and an uncomfortable image of physical distortion. Yet this comparison shows where Malignant fails. It’s the ugliness of this paranoia made visceral. A metaphor about male-dominated society’s anxiety toward the bonds between mother and children, and even a fear of the reproductive process unto itself, underlies the entire running time of The Brood. But then that’s because like all other Cronenberg films, the body horror was merely a means to an end. The revelation of these children is visually more shocking and scarring than any image of twisted, misshapen appendages or opening skulls in Malignant. In that film, a couple’s messy divorce and child custody battle takes on horrific connotations when the wife (Samantha Eggar) seeks experimental psychological treatment from a doctor (Oliver Reed) who convinces her to physically manifest her pain: which involves the shocking ending where she gives birth to a brood of monstrous alien-children who kill her subconscious’ enemies and attempt take her daughter back from her estranged husband. Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) bears particular similarities to Malignant. There are definite similarities between Malignant and several Cronenberg horror movies from the late 1970s and early ‘80s, which trafficked all in the shock of physical deformity to get under the skin-and closer to darker thoughts in the mind. Is this Wan’s attempt at playing in David Cronenberg’s sandbox? In that sense, the image of an underdeveloped “cancer” growing out of a little girl’s back in Malignant is pure body horror. On paper, the twist of Gabriel’s origin might suggest Wan is attempting to mainstream and revitalize a different type of horror, just as he did with “torture porn” in Saw and modern haunted house movies in Insidious and The Conjuring. It also fails spectacularly on nearly every level. ![]() It’s a bold gambit from a filmmaker who has the security of a billion-dollar Aquaman franchise behind him to take big swings like this. ![]() Not until audiences are over an hour in do they realize what kind of schlocky silliness they’ve signed up for. The concept is pure lunacy, and stranger still James Wan pivots his entire movie around the “reveal” of this image of Gabriel emerging out of the back of Madison’s head. He stopped developing early on during their mother’s pregnancy, yet he’s shared literal space in Madison’s head and on her body ever since… and he’s been lying dormant for nearly 30 years until a nasty bump on the head gives him the ability to take over sis’ body and crawl out of her skull! Yes, the monster killing everyone is actually the forgotten sibling of Madison (Annabelle Wallis). If you’ve read this far, we hope you’ve seen the movie and it’s not a spoiler to say that Gabriel-the mysterious “imaginary friend” from a forgotten childhood-is actually a parasitic twin. In fact, it is on a hill of that batshit where Malignant will live or die for most viewers. The filmmaker behind some of the biggest horror movies from this century- Saw, Insidious, and The Conjuring in all under a decade-used that clout to pass on a sure thing like directing The Conjuring 3 and instead created something absolutely batshit crazy. No matter what you think of James Wan’s Malignant, you have to give him this much: it’s pretty original. This article contains Malignant spoilers.
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