Horror film in the twenty-first century has moved beyond the unsettling offspring of The Omen (1976), The Exorcist (1973), and The Bad Seed (2000). (1956).
As in 2009’s Orphan or 2019’s The Hole in the Ground, contemporary horror entertainment presents moviegoers with uncanny duplicates of children – companions who take advantage of trauma to enter and ultimately destroy the family unit.
M3gan, directed by Gerard Johnstone, is the latest film to follow this trend. For those who have avoided the numerous TikTok parodies, the title refers to the Model 3 Generative Android doll, or M3gan for short.
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After Cady’s (Violet McGraw) parents die unexpectedly, her roboticist aunt Gemma (Allison Williams of Get Out fame) brings M3gan home to help her niece cope with this devastating change. M3gan will serve as Cady’s instructor, playmate, and most importantly, guardian.
Unsurprisingly, with director James Wan (Saw, Insidious, Malignant) and Blumhouse Productions (The Purge, Sinister, Get Out) at the helm, the plot spirals into mayhem, bloodshed, and a great deal of theatrics as M3gan grows determined to become Cady’s only protector at any cost.
This film examines childhood trauma and unspoken tensions in developing familial bonds through a combination of frights and chuckles. M3gan quickly surpasses her programming, responding to perceived dangers with a homicidal flair.
Cady must choose between her addicted relationship with M3gan and her precarious relationship with her tech-savvy aunt.
The narrative of M3gan is a wild journey, although it is not wholly original. The film was released one year after Hanna Bergholm’s Hatching (Pahanhautoja), Finland’s own horror story about a traumatized girl in need of protection.
Both films construct their eerie “children” using animatronics, puppetry, visual effects, and child performers. In contrast to M3gan’s robotic doll, Tinja, age 12, seeks refuge from her domineering, uncaring mother in an abandoned egg that hatches into a half-bird, half-human creature named Alli.
M3gan and Alli both become excessively protective of their young female counterparts as a result of shared themes of abandonment and grief.
Current mainstream horror cinema is heavily concerned with trauma themes, be it racial trauma in Get Out (2017), grieving trauma in Midsommar (2019), or the return of repressed childhood trauma in Malignant (2021).
The depiction of childhood trauma in horror films challenges and destroys the child’s and the family’s ostensibly safe environment. Cady’s lack of control over her identity is extremely sinister in M3gan. Her artificial companion records all of their encounters and will eventually be programmed to contain Cady’s whole personality.
What initially appears helpful is gradually recognized as harmful data collection, fueling M3gan’s disruption of family intimacy.Although M3gan and Alli from Hatching appear to be harmless children, their behavior is disorderly and murderous. M3gan is the most recent horror film to combine the absurd with the gruesome, a subject also found in 2022’s The Menu and Barbarian.
M3gan is already being described as a “instant cult classic,” and the doll at its center is being hailed as a “queer icon.”
Her over-the-top interpretation of madness has connected with viewers. Whether she’s dancing through a murder spree or singing her ward to sleep with an a capella performance of Sia’s Titanium, M3gan is so well-designed for viral fame that she’s already an icon on TikTok.
Possibly, she represents not just the demise of the “traditional” or “nuclear” family, but also perseverance and flexibility in the face of it. It appears to modern viewers that M3gan’s disintegration of normal family structures is not a negative development.
In fact, many online replies celebrate M3gan’s disruption of Gemma’s efforts to reestablish a nuclear family; M3gan’s willful contempt for established cultural ideals is praised, not criticized.
This little robotic serial murderer continues her relentless tango into hearts, thoughts, and memes.
»‘M3gan’ review: An robotic doll is on a mission to harm the family«