Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Malignant’ on HBO Max, James Wan’s Most Deranged and Visionary Horror Flick Yet

Malignant — once again streaming on HBO Max, after first debuting on the service in the fall of 2021 — is the latest horror endeavor by James Wan the visual stylist who made Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring before venturing into fat-paycheck franchises via Furious 7 and Aquaman. It’s tempting to say the new film is a return to his roots; it’s both an original concept and a conglomeration of American-frightmaster, giallo and J-horror influences. Oh, and it’s also ingeniously cracked, as if Wan was handed a fat budget and allowed full creative freedom to indulge his every untamed impulse. Now let’s see if that’s for the better, or for worse.

MALIGNANT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A LUDICROUSLY GOTHIC SEASIDE RESEARCH HOSPITAL WHERE NOTHING STRANGE WOULD EVER OCCUR, 1993: A psychiatrist hits record for her latest camcorder patient log when she’s interrupted. Said patient has just escaped, again, and is consuming electricity and “broadcasting his thoughts” on electronic devices. An orderly ends up with a gruesome compound fracture. It’s a real mess, this scene. It’s also hilarious — so it goes, eh? Cut to: PRESENT DAY, not that you can tell by Madison’s (Annabelle Wallis) 1979 bowl-cut bangs, ancient Corolla station wagon and 150-year-old house complete with ominous stained-glass window. Nothing strange would ever occur here either, no doubt.

Anyway, Madison’s pregnant, married to an abusive cretin, and of course his name is DEREK (Jake Abel). They argue, he punches her in the stomach and slams her head against the wall and she locks him out of the bedroom. That night, Derek is sleeping on the couch (when he should be on the curb) and he’s awakened by, well, let’s just call them “ghostly disturbances” and “electronical surges.” A terrifying humanoid-shaped black figure with long stringy hair jump-scares him and when Madison jolts awake — please note the bloodstain on her pillow from the aforementioned altercation — she goes downstairs to find poor Derek’s head cocked at an unnatural angle, and therefore dead as dead can be. The terrifying humanoid-shaped black figure with long stringy hair peers over the corpse and chases her and knocks her down and she blacks out and wakes up in the hospital. Her sister Sydney (Maddie Hasson) is there, and she, too has quite the set of bangs on her head. Madison lost the baby and her husband, which is a 50/50 tragedy/comedy development if you ask me, because one less DEREK in the world makes for a better world.

Two detectives, Kekoa Shaw (George Young) and Regina Moss (Michole Briana White), arrive on the scene to make fun of the nerdy forensics girl — of course her name is WINNIE (Ingrid Bisu), and I truly believe the world needs more WINNIEs — behind her back and also try to piece together what happened. Easier said than done, because nothing quite adds up within the parameters of common physics. Two weeks pass and Madison goes back to the unavoidable atmospheric weirdness of her lovely vintage home so she can be chased by the terrifying humanoid-shaped black figure with long stringy hair that one assumes is a horrifying manifestation of a tortured soul, but my advice for this movie is, assume nothing. Nothing! There’s a sequence when the terrifying humanoid-shaped black figure with long stringy hair that one assumes is a horrifying manifestation of a tortured soul (but assume nothing) strings up a local tour guide (Jean Louisa Kelly) in its evil lair, which one assumes will be significant later, and is almost certainly a safe assumption to make, maybe.

Meanwhile, Madison isn’t just being chased by the terrifying humanoid-shaped black figure with long stringy hair that one assumes is a horrifying manifestation of a tortured soul, she’s experiencing a type of waking paralysis accompanied by a shitload of CG FX, and watching said terrifying humanoid-shaped black figure with long stringy hair that one assumes is a horrifying manifestation of a tortured soul as it murders the life right out of people. It happens often enough that you wonder if Head Wound Hannah here needs an MRI or three. And wouldn’t you know, those murderees are doctors from the gothic seaside hospital where nothing strange would ever occur, at least until about 1993. The thing swipes one of the doctor’s EXCELLENCE IN SURGERY trophies and crafts it into a nifty stabber-weapon, a limited-edition replica of which will almost certainly be available for purchase from Mondo in the coming weeks for like 300 bucks. Anyway, plenty of amusingly hairy-scary things will happen before the Bangs Sisters and their detective friends get to the bottom of all this, trust me.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Lots of Suspiria colors and zoomy-wooshy Sam Raimi cameras here; the villain and the VHS fetishism is very Ringu; dashes of Halloween-style slasherisms; a couple of weird Verhoeven vibes; and David Cronenberg hovers over the whole endeavor, maybe like the hand of god.

Performance Worth Watching: This movie is very funny, but it’s even funnier because Wallis straight-faces it through the whole thing like Angelina Jolie in a serial-killer thriller.

Memorable Dialogue: “Records storage. Basement level. Of course.” — Sydney rolls her eyes as she tickles a cliche like she just knows she’s in a ridiculous horror movie

Sex and Skin: None:TBWWTHTTHSBFWLSHTOAIAHMOATSDITF: Too Busy Wondering What The Hell The Terrifying Humanoid-Shaped Black Figure With Long Stringy Hair That One Assumes Is A Horrifying Manifestation Of A Tortured Soul’s Damage Is To F—.

Our Take: Malignant is a couple dozen conceptual larks wadded together into a thoroughly enjoyable whole: Relatively fresh detective-procedural, haunted-house and slasher-flick tropes. A whirr-click-crackle vintage-tech fetish. Psychological horror including, but not limited to, hypnotic regression and repressed memories. Throwback visual textures. Dabblings in mystery, action and self-aware comedy. Effectively gross stabs at splatter-gore, with an emphasis on compound fractures. The occasional occultic flourish. And it’s all brought together sort of but not all that coherently with a core ties-that-bind metaphor that’s horrifying, gross, demented and funny as hell. I yelped at some of Wan’s reveals, and I’m one stoic SOB.

Now, most horror-thriller twists suck dumpster juice through a straw, but this one’s jaw-droppingly warped. I know the mere mention that twists exist in a movie may be a DEFCON 5-level spoiler, but consider it advice to stay on Wan’s cuckoo choo-choo through the bumpy early scenes, because he eventually smooths out the ride. Standard frightfest hokum mingles uneasily with a thoroughly disturbing scene of domestic violence before the film settles down and becomes a blackhearted comedy spiked with cornball melodrama and the occasional bit of snappy banter. The jokey tone isn’t really spoofy or campy, but chilling and funny like top-of-his-game Raimi.

Visually, Wan’s so far off the leash, he turns cliches into treasure. He confidently toys with atmospheric textures, stages a rollicking single-shot fight sequence and shows enough deference to good old-fashioned practical-effects blood and guts to effectively endear himself to stick-in-the-mud horror traditionalists who might be pissed at him for making a movie that’s actually funny. Better yet, Wan’s use of the crackity bones sound effect (crackity crackity CRACKITY BONES!) actually makes sense within the parameters of the plot, so if I ever offered my kingdom for a justified use of the ol’ crackity bones, I’d be giving it up right now.

It’s far from a perfect film, but Malignant slathers enough eccentricity and style atop familiar ideas to make it feel like a work of true vision and — well, I almost said “artistry,” but that’s a step beyond the pale. So let’s stick with vision, because the film is a bit more than the sum of its influences, Wan’s fulfilling an ambition to entertain. It’s distinctive, rousing, weird, stylish, amusing, sublimely dumb nonsense, and all the better for it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Malignant is wacky, but never wack. I laughed, I cried, I often struggled to tell the difference.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Malignant on HBO Max