Directed by Gerard Johnstone
Screenplay by Akela Cooper
Story by Akela Cooper & James Wan
Produced by Jason Blum & James Wan
Starring
Allison Williams
Jenna Davis
Violet McGraw
Cinematography Peter McCaffrey
Edited by Jeff McEvoy
Music by Anthony Willis
Production companies Blumhouse Productions, Atomic Monster, Poductions, Divide/Conquer
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Haunted doll type stories (Chuckie, Child’s Play) are by their nature creepy and unco. As a kid, I used to find those dolls that open or closed their eyes and said “Mama” when you twisted them from vertical to horizontal to be revolting, and I don’t generally watch such movies. But the updated premise that caught my eye with M3GAN was the technological twist. M3gan isn’t a doll; she’s an android with AI, designed to be a tutor, companion and friend to the prepubescent set. Yes, M3gan looks like one of those “mama” dolls that grossed me out many years ago, but she’s a pretty big one, standing about four feet tall. And just realistic enough to move from the realm of Unco into Uncanny Valley.
You have a genius computer engineer (Gemma, played by Allison Williams) who has just taken custody of her recently orphaned nine-year old niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). She doesn’t know anything about kids, and wasn’t entertaining any plans to learn. They aren’t getting on well until Cady stumbles across Bruce, down in the basement. Bruce is an early AI project of Gemma’s that got abandoned. He might have eventually evolved into a child’s companion (For all that she doesn’t like kids, Gemma sure spends a lot of time making surrogate friends for them), but in his present incarnation, he looks more like Robocop’s infamous ED-209, a perfectly nice and misunderstood guardian who was only innocently throwing corporate board members through 35th storey windows. Realizing that planting the kid in front of Nickelodeon for 14 hours a day wasn’t going to do the trick, she returns to another unofficial project at work, an AI companion named M3GAN (mostly puppets and CGI, but some key scenes played by Amie Donald, who did her own stunt work, and voiced by Jenna Davis. She’s in hot water over this project with her boss, David (Ronny Chieng), who is your standard issue tech bro billionaire with vapid ethics and a keen eye for profit. The sort you would like to see ED-209 defenestrate just because he’s annoying. But the new improved M3GAN excites his profit lust, and he orders the prototype rushed to production mode. Which is where things start to come apart, since as friend and guardian to Cady, M3GAN is a little too good at her job.
Lacking a comparative metric to other creepy doll stories, I will say the acting is good, even the two playing M3GAN despite the obvious theatric limitations involved in playing a psychotic AI doll. It’s well paced, engaging, and isn’t lacking in suspense. It’s well told, well acted, and worth watching. If the plot is predictable, it beats just having M3GAN open and close her eyes and say “mama,” doesn’t it?
Oh, yes, and there is a M3GAN sequel in the works for 2025. M4GAN, anybody?