M3GAN (dir. Gerard Johnstone, 2022) — Review

The ChatGPT furore has shown that we’re awfully keen to outsource the boring, thankless tasks formerly considered ‘gainful employment’ to AI: schoolwork, LinkedIn posts, marketing copy. In M3GAN, populist horror mogul James Wan dares to dream of a solution to the most boring and thankless task of all — parenting.

A jolly, R.L. Stine-sort’a jaunt, M3GAN bundles the greatest horrors of those born in the 20th century — namely the younger generation and the inexorable march of technology — into a catty, preteen four-foot robot. Dipping into a selection of genres for a serial-killer drag revue, the film puts a militantly camp but technically disciplined spin on those most American of genres, the coming-of-age story and the utopian sci-fi. James Wan has almost become the H&M of horror, with a crowd-pleasing, unpretentious range of 2010s essentials like The Conjuring, Insidious, and killer doll smash Annabelle. Having tuned his sixth sense for the foibles of Middle America (or in The Conjuring 2, the North London suburb of Enfield), Wan takes the high-concept, sci-fi utopian dreams of Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov and mashes them up with Drag Race.

The film’s set-up could come straight from The Veldt or Robbie: emotionally neglected but financially secure child (the backbone of the Western canon) lands in the lap of resentful adult. In this case, workaholic STEM girlboss Gemma (Alison Williams), burdened with her orphaned niece Cady (Violet McGraw), partners her young charge with an AI au-pair named M3gan (Model 3 Generative Android).

M3gan, a work-in-progress of Gemma’s ritzy Seattle toy company, is programmed to bond with its ‘primary user’ and act as a best friend, home tutor, and therapist. Unsurprisingly, this has been the stuff of science fiction dreams (and naturally nightmares) since the ‘30s — from Bradbury’s murderous smart home, a post-human Hansel and Gretel revenge fantasy on the neglectful parents, to Asimov’s sweet little robot doggie. Generally, in the tradition laid down from changeling myths to The Chronicles of Narnia, these tales of neglected children and the dubious, inhuman ‘friends’ they find treat their companions as superhuman, otherworldly, ethereal. Enter M3gan to fill a gap in the market. From the minute she sashays through the front door and whips off a pair of oversized sunglasses, one thing is clear: M3gan is here to slay, hunty.

As box-office audiences spiral further into an increasingly wretched decade, edgy horror-commentary (remember Black Mirror?) seems about as enticing as Madonna’s TikTok thirst traps. AI? Terrifying. Raising a child? In this economy? Even worse. Lately, not even Gemma’s career path in tech seems safe. M3GAN sneaks in a weirdly optimistic spin on the whole sorry state of affairs, by making us root for the killer robot. After all, she’s not really evil — she’s just following orders!

Embodied by New Zealand child actress Amie Donald, M3gan, like all the best robot villains, has one thing on her side: neither she nor her young charge Cady asked for any of this. The screenplay (co-written by Wan and rising star Akela Cooper) makes sure to acknowledge that other great bugbear of our times: corporate greed — dramatized when initial safety concerns about the robot are overriden by investors in Gemma’s company, with disastrous results. This is but one of the uncomfortably realistic horrors that form the basis of the plot, artfully embroidered with high-kicking murderous dance sequences, bitchy comebacks, and Home Alone-worthy physical comedy. ‘What are you doing?’ wonders one of M3gan’s creators-slash-nemeses, as she vogues her way down an office hallway to a gurgling disco beat. Next line of dialogue: ‘Oh sh*t’, as she grabs a paper guillotine.

Beyond her killer put-downs, M3gan engineers sympathy from a demographic frustrated with modern life through her relationship with Cady. The cartoonish violence of her ripping off a bully’s ear then chasing him through the woods on all fours, for instance, has a twinge of vigilante justice. More down with the kids than previous killer dolls, she swaps the hackneyed ‘Do you wanna play?’ for ‘Do you wanna hang out?’ — perfect for the commitment- and rejection-anxious social media generation. Locked in a murderous grapple in Cady’s bedroom, both M3gan and Gemma, like any competitive parents, are desperate to keep their standing in the kid’s eyes, and claim that Gemma is doing repairs. ‘It sounds like you’re fighting in there’, calls Cady. ‘We’re not fighting’, screech her suitors in unison, trying to decapitate each other. ‘I’m all odds and ends, I don’t want you to see me like this’, musters M3gan. Hard relate.

With M3GAN 2.0 greenlit before the theatrical release of the first instalment, the franchise seems set to run long into the future, possibly until a point where the IP can be adapted, performed and rendered by an AI requiring no human oversight — a M3gan crafting its own original take on the M3GAN story. We must all learn to welcome our robot overlords; M3gan seems set to be one them.