THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
The great cinematographic fantastic art is less about the flight towards progress, towards renewal, than about a perpetual return to the sources. The nightmare of the inanimate which comes to life, the revolt of the machines, the humanization of the inhuman… if you search a little, it is possible to find, at the sources of the second feature film for the cinema by New Zealander Gerard Johnstone, who had already signed the macabre comedy Housebound in 2014, a whole literary and cultural genealogy. The best of what we call horror cinema is thus less marked by an ability to invent new mythologies – moreover, is this really possible? – than by digging into, updating, questioning some fundamental archetypes, confronting them with new rhetoric by adapting to the affects and stimuli of the contemporary spectator.
It is in the almost perfect success of this alchemy that lies the great interest of M3gan, new Blumhouse production, less interested in the dubious project of ennobling and intellectualizing cinematic horror than in finding the best way to give it a tangible reality, a spectacular efficiency and a complex meaning, interweaving several degrees of meaning. In summary, M3gan effectively frightens. The film is, in fact, supported by a particularly skilful art of dramatic progression, the rise of anguish, and a way of changing affects during the story, going from a melodramatic and sentimental form to an unleashing cathartic with a violence that is both liberating and morbid.
Cady (Violet McGraw) is a little girl who has just suddenly lost her parents in an accident. She is taken in by her aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), a researcher in an electronic toy company, who has just developed a life-size android doll, endowed with intelligence and the ability to react in an almost human way to the solicitations of the child. The girl will become the guinea pig of an experiment during which she will live alongside her new “friend” and under the supervision of her aunt and the company that financed the experimental robot while waiting for massive commercialization. of this one. Cady will become attached to the doll until weaving with her an exclusive and fusional relationship, a relationship which, when threatened, will trigger violent reactions from the android, which has become out of control and murderous.
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