M3GAN (2022)

If there's ever a movie that'll keep you from getting a Google Home or Alexa, then maybe this is the one! That outro, woah...

I saw trailers for this movie earlier and was intrigued but not entirely convinced by it. Thought it'd be a similar creepy doll movie as say Chucky, or one of the other classics of the old days, with an AI twist, but it was... so much more.

It's a psychological thriller, mostly, and the child actor Violet McGraw in particular really shines in portraying the trauma and conflict of interest you'd get at that particular age. It starts so simple, but true despair appears in the severed connection between her and her mother.

When you no longer know who to trust. When you make something that doesn't actually exist more important than life itself - and when you create an artificial intelligence with unbridled opportunities.

Never mind original objectives.

In the end though she did honor them. She did seem to have Cady in her best interest after all. And it's sad in a way that it ends how it does.

They could've focused more on that conflict of interest, and existence. Made her even more of an unwilling villain. An evil created out of love, and out of necessity; out of the naivety of curiosity and engineering.

In the final scenes there's a bit too much reliance of jumpscares, and those typically unnatural Doll-like motions so prevalent in for example The Ring and Silent Hill.

They're overplayed a bit. I wish they'd gone differently with those scenes.

IMO it's even more scary with a calm; with an evil that shows not so much in motion as in expression. More build. Less jump.

That would've been the ideal way to go IMO! Even with the dog - the first show of something gone wrong with the programming. Jumpscare there too.

Blumhouse are really on a roll with these horror movies though! And their logo's awesome. As is the intro. From pets that die to pets that live forever to living dolls... reminds me of a bit of that Arnold Schwarzenegger classic too. The Sixth... something? Maybe it even inspired this.

Great movie, great concept, great script, great actors too, but similar to for example Brightburn it unfortunately loses some of it's potential ominousness and psychological thrill with cliche and unnecessarily violent directing.

 rated 4.5/5: almost awesome