After scoring one of the decade’s great critical and commercial successes with Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” it’s no wonder that Blumhouse Productions doubled down on the low-budget “social thriller.” Their prevailing model that’s overtaken the genre has seen delights (“The Invisible Man,” “Nanny”) and duds (“The Hunt,” “They/Them”). What felt freshly reimagined in 2017 has become somewhat rote as screenwriters all but baked the inevitable think-pieces into the scripts themselves. The outfit’s latest release, “M3GAN,” however, abandons the pretenses of self-seriousness without sacrificing either scares or smarts. This cautionary tale of the Model 3 Generation Android, a lifelike (but still uncanny valley-dwelling) AI doll called M3GAN for short, is firmly of the old-school model of schlocky scare-fests. Like the titular character, the film’s intelligence proves to be agile and sneaky in its evolution.
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Neither director Gerard Johnstone nor screenwriter Akela Cooper (who shares a story credit with “Saw” and “Insidious” maestro James Wan) blare the importance of their commentary. They’re not aiming to deliver their message in a cerebral manner. Instead, they wait until the audience’s mouth is agape – be it from screaming or laughing – to shove their message down viscerally. “M3GAN” operates from a base assumption all too often forgotten. Technology evolves society, but it does so by reflecting the anxieties and annoyances of the people craving disruption in the first place. It arises to fill a need for its creators.
The M3GAN doll languishes in development for roboticist Gemma (Allison Williams) when she feels pressure from her CEO David (a cartoonish Ronny Chieng) to simply manufacture another hit toy for the market. It’s not for lack of trying on her part – she’s all but a conservative commentator’s caricature of the unhappy careerist woman. Gemma comes from a generation where many find work easy and parenthood unnatural. The meta-casting of Williams, who spent several seasons working through similar tensions of millennial maturation on television’s “Girls,” adds an additional – if subtle – dimension of meaning to the character.
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Gemma’s maternal ambivalence becomes abundantly clear when she becomes tasked with the care of her recently orphaned niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). Even though the 8-year-old in her custody has never needed more love and attention, she still cannot summon the strength to prioritize her personal life over her professional obligations. Gemma first turns to offload her caring responsibilities to the tablet, throwing caution to the wind on the limits on “screen time” once established by Cady’s parents. But she quickly comes to the realization that the answer lies in her laboratory: the untested M3GAN prototype (embodied by Amie Donald, voiced by Jenna Davis).
At first, Gemma’s gambit works like a charm. Cady gets a friend and parent rolled into one, and the devotion becomes unbreakable thanks to locking in her “primary user” status by pairing with her fingers. Gemma gets to automate and outsource the most mundane aspects of parenting, thus preserving her time for tasks that matter. M3GAN’s deployment is the logical endpoint of the 21st-century tech boom, which never met a social problem that an algorithm could not fix.
But as Gemma begins to realize with M3GAN’s changing understanding of her protective function, there are some emotions that simply cannot be “hacked.” Helping a child deal with messy emotions like grief and regret is unruly in ways that no technology can predict. And this is only one element in the multivariable calculus of parenting, a hard truth Gemma must learn at the hands of her own haywire creation. The cold rationalism of M3GAN leads the doll to interpret such situations in a literalized and often reductively binary fashion.
And because all technology bears the traces and biases of its originators, M3GAN warps a terminal case of Silicon Valley poptimism into her vortex of pseudo-parental panic. It’s here where Johnstone and Cooper have the most fun with “M3GAN,” brandishing their film’s funny bone only to promptly saw it off and splatter blood on the viewer. The doll’s depraved displays of defensiveness toward Cady become the warped reflections of girlboss feminism as glimpsed through a funhouse mirror.
Even something as simple as the way M3GAN responds to a teenage brute who attempts to intimidate Cady resonates with intentionality. The doll flexes flippantly but entirely forcefully as she wields her perverse power. M3GAN slays, serves, and scares the living daylights out of anyone who realizes the ruthless logic of her programming. She’s campy and chilling in equal measure as she optimizes until the bitter end.
“M3GAN” locates the horror and hilarity lurking barely beneath the surface of our screen-addled society. The film never belabors its topicality by resorting to preachy platitudes. In the end, Johnston and Cooper look for the darker questions raised by investigating the obvious ones. When does technology move from preserving our humanity to erasing it? Are solutions and distractions just two sides of the same coin? Can companies calibrate their inventions so finely that children might lose their ability to distinguish virtual relationships from real ones?
Through horror and hilarity, often simultaneously, “M3GAN” upholds the genre’s highest tradition. This film does not just generate fear. It exposes it. [B]
“M3GAN” opens in wide release on January 6.