One Line Review: Malignant starts off with great horror but loses the grip in the second half.
Youtube Trailer Malignant
Starring: Annabelle Walis, Ingrid Bisu
Director: James Wan
Release Date: 10 September 2021
Introduction
You can say that James Wan celebrates more than his trajectory by looking at the references that accompanied him, in Maligno, today’s premiere in cinemas. Before taking on a life of its own, Wan presents us with a compendium of what horror cinema is/was over the last four or five decades, in strokes as strong as they are punctual.
We’ll know throughout the exhibition that there’s a larger project that encapsulates the authorship that the genre doesn’t often see. Alongside Mike Flanagan, the filmmaker not only pays homage to horror, but he also reveres it with elegance, and perhaps here he is ready to transcend it by taking his own basic expression to give a particular look too much of what he saw in childhood, enhancing his aesthetic for a clear evolution.
Plot Analysis
As if it had been divided into two parts, Wan uses a concept where the past complements the present and vice versa, giving the narrative password for his own story with the genre to be revamped. In the initial slice, a guessing game is played with the spectator, and Maligno piles up a wealth of aesthetic-narrative references to celebrate his own childhood. From Hammer movies with scientific studies in torture sanatoriums to the New Hollywood that Friedkin and the Amityville movie series brought us from haunted mansions, through Larry Cohen’s Hands of A Monster to Slipping into Traditional Italian Giallos, to salad is not cluttered, although on paper it sounds lumpy.
Second half breaking the rules
In the second half of the projection, the script’s puzzle is presented and the intentional game bordering the codes of horror, the creator of the Evil Invocation universe gives a trip to the viewer, who (if experienced) immediately realizes that “recess is over”, and everything then happens regardless of the content, in fact, a simple vector for the construction of a circus of imagery wonders. From the encounter of the “hero” of the production, a detective named Kekoa Shaw (yes, Kekoa!), with his opponent, there is a detachment from what still resisted organic to what is purposefully based on the artifice. There is no longer any interest in narratively justifying its trajectory, it’s all a great epic of lights, shapes, darkness, and masks, fairy and beautiful, with a punk vein and a strategy exclusively based on results, a radical bet on the ends justifying the means.
From that moment onward, Wan establishes an implicit rule: there are no rules, other than providing the spectacle. From the Seattle underground comes an ecstatic chase, from a police station raid, comes one of the most enchanting action sequences of the year, a relentless quest for escapism and immediate emotion, present from the moment “the magician’s secret” is revealed. When the script opens his book in high relief and the preposterous revelation finally comes, the director has already stunned us so absolutely that we can only try to capture the speed of the frames shot on the screen. He’s in a hurry for enchantment, his editing juggling moves on to rapture—a brilliant work by Kirk Morri.
Miscommunication of theme
It’s not a dazzling image adventure like Godzilla vs Kong, and it didn’t fit. What is in check in Maligno is a veritable “matrioska”—inside little Wan’s mind comes a parable of brotherly love shadowed by the allegory of terror that accompanied the boy; from within this study comes a film that is not ashamed of its hypnotic abilities through the rapture caused by the most luxurious and complex entertainment that the talent is capable of conceiving; From within this exquisite blockbuster package comes a film that has a final layer to present of material reconfiguration… and who could have imagined that they would be facing a powerful cry of female empowerment, one of the most effective and violent of recent times.
Conclusion
With so many possibilities proposed and armed in its creation, seeing this risky game make sense from its starting point, minimally interconnecting to draw a path of coherence with something to say, is so much more than a product of the genre actually does it, that the final plan, chaotic but truly affectionate around a trio of literally reborn women, seems to obey a single order — the expression of James Wan, the child turned director, completed his most ambitious castle.
