All Hail the New Queen of Horror-Comedy Camp: M3GAN
Long before M3GAN hit theaters, the film’s titular cyborg, who can best be described as a mashup of Renesmee from Twilight (if she was a raging sadist) and a yassified Baby Annette, became a viral sensation. Shortly after the first trailer came out, Twitter crowned the dead-eyed doll a horror icon in the way only Twitter can, and fan-cams of 2023’s new favorite Terminator girly dancing to Charli XCX’s “Hot Girl’’ began to circulate the internet a mile a minute. Now, it goes without saying that there’s a big difference between a film and its marketing campaign, but, somewhat miraculously, M3GAN manages to live up to its spectacular advertising. (Though in retrospect, this new triumph in horror camp shouldn’t be that surprising, as Malignant’s James Wan and Akela Cooper, AKA the people who gave us this scene just last year, co-wrote the film).
As far as its plot goes, M3GAN doesn’t stray too far from the tried-and-true “AI gone wrong” story format. After losing both of her parents in a tragic car accident, young Cady (Violet McGraw) moves in with her aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), a toy company roboticist partially responsible for PurrpetualPetz: Stuffed animals that have human-like teeth and, among other things, take shits.
Realizing she is not equipped to care for a youngster, Gemma makes it her mission to finish building M3GAN—or Model 3 Generative Android—a robot designed specifically to be your child’s most loyal BFF. That’s one way to parent! If you can find it in your heart to suspend disbelief for long enough to believe that Gemma could have stolen $100k from her company for its creation without getting fired, or that she was able to build the world’s most intelligent cyborg in, more-or-less, a single montage, M3GAN kicks exhilaratingly into gear as soon as the doll first rears her unsettling little head.
At first, life with M3GAN is peachy. She manages to eradicate Cady’s grief by playing with her day in and day out, while also taking care of the nitty-gritty parenting stuff so that Gemma doesn’t have to. But as the old saying goes, “Nothing gold can stay, and little robot girls inevitably turn into sadistic, vicious killing machines.”
Soon enough, M3GAN starts to take her “protect Cady at all costs” programming a little too literally (who could’ve seen that coming?), resulting in a string of darkly comical sequences of violence—one of which may or may not involve the talking doll zealously wielding a nail gun.