Since movie theatres were forced to temporarily close in 2020, there’s been a lot of buzz and bluster about what hot new film release might have the power to swoop in and single-handedly save cinema. Well, move over Avatar, forget about Tenet: cinema has a brand new saviour in town. Her name is M3gan.

Picking fights with Chucky and Ghostface when she’s not busy being proclaimed cinema’s new scream queen by Jamie Lee Curtis, M3gan might be four feet tall and wrapped in silicone but she will not be underestimated.

The concept is pretty simple: roboticist Gemma (Allison Williams) invents an android doll to help her recently-orphaned niece Cady (Violet McGraw) through her grief, but the android doll takes her drive to eliminate harm a little too seriously. Sure, it might read like your standard killer-robot horrorshow, and yes, the trailer might look like a TikTok trend parody, but this film is so much more than the sum of its parts.

Part horror, part comedy, part walking-talking-meme, whatever combination of words you use to describe it, M3GAN sounds like it should be a trainwreck. However, M3GAN is nothing short of an absolute delight.

Leaning into its own absurdity, M3GAN is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is an edge-of-your-seat thrill. Sharply scripted and self-aware, the film takes what’s otherwise a predictable plot and puts events in the hands of a pint-sized girlbot/sasspot who’s ready to see her adversaries burn (and honestly, who hasn’t felt that way once or twice?). The result is a character-defining brand of chaos that’s utterly gleeful to watch. She sings, she dances, she’s a machete-wielding badass. Simply put, M3gan is having the kind of fun that other horror villains would die for.

Slaying dancefloors and dirtbags in one fell swoop, M3gan is the anti-hero you didn’t know you’d been waiting for and she’s not letting anyone stand in her way. 

RATING: 4/5

INFORMATION

CAST: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Jenna Davis, Amie Donald

DIRECTOR: Gerard Johnstone

WRITERS: Akela Cooper, James Wan

SYNOPSIS: A robotics engineer at a toy company builds a life-like doll that begins to take on a life of its own.