Main cast: Annabelle Wallis (Madison Lake Mitchell), Maddie Hasson (Sydney Lake), George Young (Detective Kekoa Shaw), Michole Briana White (Detective Regina Moss), Jean Louisa Kelly (Jane Doe), Susanna Thompson (Jeanne Lake), Jake Abel (Derek Mitchell), Jacqueline McKenzie (Dr Florence Weaver), and Christian Clemenson (Dr Victor Fields)
Director: James Wan

Poor Madison Lake Mitchell. She’s pregnant, but she’s also married to an abusive SOB that slams her head against the wall, leaving her bloodied, during an altercation. Well, she locks the door of their bedroom so that she can sleep alone that night, and when she wakes up, he’s dead. Wait, she dreamed that a man broke into the house and killed Derek while she was asleep earlier—does she have latent psychic powers or something, ooh?

At any rate, subsequent police investigations suggest that there may be more than meets the eye here, and Madison is soon contacted by the killer. Oh my, he claims to be her imaginary childhood friend. Wait, so did she develop psychic powers that she can now use to manifest homicidal maniacs? That’s actually quite a cool superpower, come to think of it.

Malignant hurts my soul in several ways. This much-hyped return of James Wan to directing a horror flick abuses the words “teratoma” and “malignant”—even by characters that claim to be medical professonals—that I feel myself die inside quite a bit each time this movie hurls bad science at me with misguided severity.

Because James Wan is one of the pioneers of the current generation of crap-infested horror movies that only know how to throw jump scares at people, this one also has one of my pet peeves: a villain that seems more intent on setting up jump scares than to actually kill his victim. Seriously, this fellow can control electricity and radio waves, but instead of short circuiting his victims to a satisfying barbecue, no, he will have his victim walk slowly in dimly lit hallways, then—BOOM!—switch on the TV and—SMASH!—throw open the fridge door and… for what? The victim continues to walk around like an idiot all this while, when he could have just killed that idiot right away.

Also, nobody switches on the light or do anything sensible like that. Don’t want to lose any opportunity to throw a cheap, lazy jump scare after all!

I’ve said it before, jump scares need to be earned. There should be reason for that jump scare to happen, a good lead up, and then—BOOM!—a good pay off. Here, though, jump scares happen because morons are too stupid to switch on the lights or leave the house screaming. So, the idiot walks in teh dark tp pure silence, then BOOM! and the idiot continues to walk down the hallway, BOOM! again, and still more idiotic wandering the dark… sigh. The so-called modern horror movies these days can really kill brain cells, I tell you.

Even the entire sound and music of this movie is one long, never ending jump scare, as things will go from near-silence to jump to a BOOM! or SMASH! before going back to low-key near-silence.

Then, the revelation… oh boy. That one will work if this movie had been an absurdist comedy horror. Unfortunately, this one plays itself straight all this while, so the end result is something like Basket Case being treated like it’s an Oscar-bait in the making. This misguided “I’m making a sober horror film, I am!” treatment ends up amplifying the stupidity of the premise; if the whole thing had been treated like a laugh, then it’d be easy to just play along and go with the flow.

Does it matter, though? Malignant is just a husk of a premise served up as a script that only cares about how many jump scares and darkly lit scenes it can throw at the audience. In other words, it embodies the soullessness of the present day horror genre perfectly.