Review of M3GAN (2022) by Hnestlyonthesly — 22 May 2023

After spending the last five days glued to CSPAN to listen to two ladies call out the names of 434 members of the House, sitting down to watch a horror movie about a creepy doll with boundary issues with four close friends and one not so close friend and her date felt like a reprieve. M3GAN first hit my radar late last year when it was clear that it had been ruthlessly held back by its production company Blumhouse through no fault of its own, potentially to deny all of us footage of a 4 foot animatronic doll dancing a vaguely TikTok dance before spearing someone with an office supply like a samurai. After having seen this movie in its entirety, I can attest that M3GAN delivers on all of its promise as the awkward, middle school, uncanny doll movie you did not know you needed to see.

How much of this movie, I can hear you asking yourself aloud right now, is the lead up to the moments before M3GAN dances the TikTok? And to that I say, very little, thankfully. You do not need to wait long. Just long enough to know that Gemma (played by a radiantly awkward Allison Williams) is quite bad at parenting, like bad enough that it hurts. The way she grips her collectible toy box so strangely and cuts the packaging open with a box cutter which is haphazardly stored in a low shelf in the living room is so cringe that it’s hard to look away. One of the great crimes of this movie is we never get to see what the toy “actually does.” We simply have to believe that it is awesome, as awesome as the Furby knockoffs that are sold in all their gummy glory by the toy company, Funki, that Gemma works at.

The movie does a neat thing by flipping the evil doll tropes on their head in certain ways. The central anxiety of this movie, at least at first, is not so much working through trauma by attaching unhealthily to an inappropriate “transitional object,” but rather the millennial fear of nonconsensually becoming a parent and having someone refuse to use the coasters on your nice big girl furniture. Later the movie is about that first thing, the psychology whatever with the dead parents, but at first it’s all about the horror of having a house guest you didn’t ask for who refuses to take off her shoes when she enters the house.

Most of the scares are, in fact, related to how unnaturally M3GAN moves and also the way in which she can sneak up on you in literally any place at any time of day, but also her stupid big eyes that never close. If I ever design a super strong robot toy for transferring all of your unhealthy fears or desires, I am going to make sure that it closes its eyes a lot. Like, maybe more than is normal, like a narcoleptic old man on a warm, cozy day who’s just had a nice warm glass of milk. Friends were scratching their heads over why, with access to all this tech, someone would make a children’s toy first and not an… adult? toy? But then these are the same Friends who debated with me who would be the best person to murder on the drive to the movie, so their judgement is poor and they don’t read these reviews anyway.

The final confrontation with its strains of surrogate parenthood mixed with betrayal of a friendship which predates even Cady and M3GAN’s interactions is a nice–dare I say subtle?!–twist. You get hints of it from the final family dinner, in which Gemma and M3GAN exchange silent looks over Cady’s insane lack of self-awareness about putting **** water glasses on their proper coasters for the umpteenth time, neither willing to remind Cady while navigating a tricky conversation about death and misfortune.

On the issue of death and misfortune, the fact that no animals are graphically done in is a credit to the taste of the producers. The violence in general is surprisingly restrained considering the potential for shock factor gore. One of hte detectives who interviews Gemma after a particularly gruesome death laughs at the details of another–err–particularly gruesome death, giving us permission retrospectively to find humor, mayhaps even joy, in the deaths of others, especially because so many of the victims in this movie are complete ****.

The boy straddling the doll after taking her shoe deserves what he got. The movie understands that even a small nod to the nonconsensual sexualization of a girl doll needed to be done and needed to be done in such a way that would be both tasteful and properly punished. And actually, the heart-to-heart that M3GAN and Cady have afterwards is oddly sweet. M3GAN’s mean girltalk offered as a way of allaying Cady’s existential fears of death and afterlife while also pumping her up to take absolutely no **** from any boys is heartwarming and terrifying!

There was not as much dancing as I would have expected, considering her dancing chops, but that is a small criticism of an otherwise excellent movie, which I would add to any list of self-empowerment horror films I would show to young kids, along with Jennifer’s Body and Heathers.