M3GAN movie review & film summary (2023)
However Gemma is not a motherly kind. She’s too busy with work to spend a lot time with Cady, for one. And though she works for a toy firm, she retains her toys—sorry, collectibles—of their packing containers and on a shelf in her front room. However these two at the moment are the one household the opposite one has. So that they’ll should study to dwell collectively, at the least effectively sufficient to fulfill a court-ordered psychiatrist who’s skeptical about Gemma’s parenting skills.
Enter M3gan, who looks like the proper answer to Gemma’s drawback. An experimental prototype with a “Quick Circuit”–type means to memorize infinite quantities of knowledge, M3gan can act as a instructor and babysitter who reminds Cady to make use of a coaster and wash her arms after utilizing the toilet. She’s what each child wants, and each dad or mum secretly needs: A 24/7 companion who frees up mother and father to dwell their very own lives whereas their youngsters are preoccupied with their dolls. She’s going to make Gemma’s boss very, very wealthy—so wealthy, he rushes M3gan by means of beta testing with Cady as their solely topic. That may’t go horribly incorrect in any unexpected manner, proper?
With nimble path from “Housebound” helmer Gerard Johnstone, “M3gan” does job of holistically incorporating its themes with out being too heavy-handed. Certain, it is technically “about” grief and what occurs when the creation surpasses its creator. However greater than that, it is “about” pithy one-liners and black comedy and the unsettling sight of one thing that appears like a human being however does not transfer or sound like one. The plot does have a couple of weak factors and dangling threads, and the PG-13 ranking ensures that the violence is tamped down earlier than it will probably attain its full bloody potential. (A promising sequence of doll-based mayhem late within the movie abruptly cuts off, suggesting MPAA-mandated cuts.) However the tongue-in-cheek tone is so constant that “M3gan” is a hoot anyway.
Johnstone reaps seemingly infinite rewards from the uncanny valley side of M3gan’s character. He directs the petite stunt ladies who play her to maneuver in odd, jerky gestures, which at totally different factors recall every part from “Robocop” scanning criminals’ faces to Samara crawling out of the TV in “The Ring” to voguers excessive on their fabulousness. (He additionally makes use of what I can solely describe as “skinned Furby” aesthetics at crucial factors all through the movie.) Mixed with the doll’s sassy comebacks and dowdy sartorial sense, the impact is true camp—one thing that is tough to drag off in our irony-saturated age.
