Backwards and Forwards: James Wan's "Malignant"
Review
After an instance of domestic violence, Madison (Annabelle Wallis) starts to have visions of a series of murders that turn out to actually be happening. She and her sister enlist the help of the police who doubt them at first but begin to suspect Madison’s own involvement once a body turns up after she describes one of the grisly episodes. Meanwhile, a mysterious presence from her past as an orphan under psychiatric care, memories of which she has long repressed, seems to be tied to the killings.
There are enough clues in the opening credits that one can figure out the twist right then and there but Wan is a smart enough director that such a showing of his cards is deliberate. It’s part of what makes Malignant such a dazzling feat in that it then becomes all about how he is going to play those cards, and it is the playing of those cards that is so surprising moment-to-moment. The film is always gradually and perpetually shifting and changing into something else and is structurally designed in such a way that it pulls you into a vortex of the movie and its momentous movement. In this way, it makes for a nice pairing with David Prior’s The Empty Man, another recent triumph that feels like it contains more than one film or type of film within it. It's a new kind of horror cinema that opens up possibilities of what a single film can contain and even when transparently drawing on past influences—and it really runs the gamut in where it finds its sources—defies existing categorization. It's a level of tonal mastery and dexterity that could only be described as virtuoso.
Wan oscillates from the purely throwback to the purely original in such a way that it transcends its roots—not unlike the the old Seattle underground featured in the film and the new city built on top of it which makes for some of its most memorable staging. Wan's film too is built and stands upon the old but redraws a new map for genre. In one of those uncanny things that happen with films released in the same moment, Wan integrates “Where Is My Mind” (by way of Safari Riot) into Wan regular Joseph Bishara’s score not unlike how Collet-Serra utilized Metallica's “Nothing Else Matters” as a leitmotif in Jungle Cruise—another film that mixes old and new schools, albeit in a way more contented with convention, that renders itself utterly distinct from its moment.
The skillset that has endeared Wan to auteurists and horror fans alike is present here but at a new level. His deployment and control of light and darkness, his obsession with playing with lamps and diegetic light sources (and of course the colour red), of creating caves of shadow out of any spaces whatever, makes for awe-inspiring craft. No space that is introduced is not fully mined for its potential. Nearly every set that’s introduced eventually gives birth to an inspired set piece. The film's initial classical setup shows that Wan can pull off the most pure and effective horror mise en scène and its aforementioned shifts show that his skillset is adept at seemingly whatever he wants to do, seamlessly moving between chilling horror to blatant camp, from Argento to De Palma to Cronenberg to Raimi to Henenlotter, from thriller to action—all while keeping the core grounding of the film's impetus and emotions intact.
By making sure that the true surprises of the film are contained in its movement and its feeling more so than in its plot ensures the film's effectiveness and ability to maintain its tonal integrity even in its most batshit moments. That these shifts and oscillations are executed with such assured confidence creates a duality of experience: on a base level there are the pleasures and scares of the movie in the common sense, and secondarily in the gleeful roller coaster ride of Wan's stylistic and storytelling leaps. Such tonal schizophrenia would be a recipe for disaster in lesser hands, but Wan, whose talents have never been in doubt, reaches a new peak that ensures his status as one of the genre’s best and most inventive craftsmen working today. Through its mastery of form and embracing of possibilities without mind paid to what’s perceived to be fashionable or palatable to audiences, Malignant liberates modern horror from its contemporary configuration.
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