MALIGNANT. (2021) DIRECTED BY JAMES WAN.
SCREENPLAY BY AKELA COOPER.
STORY BY JAMES WAN, INGRID BISU AND AKELA COOPER.
STARRING ANNABELLE WALLIS, MADDIE HASSON, GEORGE YOUNG AND MICHOLE BRIANA WHITE.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
This horror film by James Wan of the CONJURING movies came to Netflix recently. I was glad because, on the only other occasion on which I’d tried to watch it (on a library DVD!), the disc froze halfway through and no amount of crying, pleading, cursing and threatening (by me to it) could persuade it to get going again.
Note to self: stop taking out DVDs from the library. While you can sometimes get lucky and find them a good source of films you’ve been wanting to watch, more often than not, by the time a hundred people, say, have borrowed and viewed the same film, the chances are it’ll have picked up a few scratches. Well, anyway, let’s talk about MALIGNANT, shall we…?
The film opens with a Dr. Florence Weaver and a team of medical staff seemingly attempting to control a murderous young mental patient, a boy we don’t see called Gabriel. Dr. Weaver grimly decides it’s ‘time to cut out the cancer,’ although we don’t know what this means at the time.
Fast-forward a few years- or decades- and a beautiful young pregnant woman called Madison loses her baby, and her brutally abusive husband Derek, in an utterly horrific home invasion, the kind that baffles the two investigating officers; the hard-assed Regina Moss and the dreamy Kekoa Shaw, a guy who will clearly do anything for a pretty face.
After the home invasion, Madison starts seeing things. Murders, to be precise. Murders that turn out to be really happening in real life at the time she’s seeing them. Morris and Shaw- well, not Shaw; I told you he’s a sucker for a pretty face- have difficulty believing Madison, and are inclined at first to see her as an hysterical woman possibly suffering from PTSD and post-natal depression, but they don’t disbelieve her for long.
In the meantime, a woman who looks a lot like Madison is attacked and abducted by a very odd-looking person or thing while locking up at her job as a tour guide in the Seattle Underground. This is a very cool, spooky network of passages and corridors that run underneath Seattle.
They’ve been there since Seattle was formed in the mid-nineteenth century, and were originally above ground, but became underground when the city was ‘elevated’ after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. Sounds mad, doesn’t it? That’s history for you. And the thing about history is, well, it’s all in the past, isn’t it…?
Anyway, the delicious Kekoa and the thorny AF Moss (moss shouldn’t be thorny, should it?) need to figure out the connection between the murder victims, the Underground lady and maybe even Madison herself. Perhaps the key to the mystery lies in Madison’s complicated past? Her sister Sydney is on hand to help, much to the delight of Detective Sex…
However, I find it hard to believe that Sydney, however determined she is to help her beloved sister Madison, drives in the middle of the night to an old abandoned mental asylum, gains entry to it without any trouble even though it’s all locked up and boarded, descends to the basement with only a torch for light, finds the place where they keep old patient files and unerringly makes her way to the exact right file she needs to crack the whole damn case wide open. Talk about stretching credulity. Just keep telling yourself, it’s a movie…
The bonkers twist blew me away. I didn’t see it coming at all, and it did explain a bit of the strangeness that had gone before. However, the villain doesn’t look fully formed or convincing when you finally see him striding around being villainous, but the twist is still phenomenal.
I’d love to be able to tell you what inspired the idea for Gabriel in the mind of Ingrid Bisu, James Wan’s wife, with whom he co-wrote the story, but I’d be giving away the amazing twist. What I can do, however, is to advise you to google the fascinating story of one Edward Mordake, sometimes called Mordlake. It will blow your mind.
Finally, the film features Patricia Velasquez in a small part as a nurse. You might remember the stunning actress and model from her roles in THE MUMMY (1999) and THE MUMMY RETURNS (2001). She played Anck-Su-Namun, the lost love of Imhotep, whom he loved so much he’d waited centuries to be re-united with her in death. She sent him back to the Underworld with a flea in his ear, just to save her own skin. Women are cruel…
sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris 