A first monster appears after a few minutes in this film, out of nowhere, in a heavy deadly snow flurry in the mountains, it has big yellow eyes and is a snowplough…
Cady, eight years old, lost her parents in a car accident, so she’s put in the care of her Aunt Gemma in Seattle, who’s young and in full start-up mode and not at all convinced that she’s cut out for this weird thing is what is called motherhood. She is played by Allison Williams, known from Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” and who has previously interacted with puppets on Sesame Street.
Gemma is a robotics engineer, she develops mechanical, mostly fluffy toys that children can use to communicate and thus relieve the parents. Your automatons, endowed with artificial intelligence, are more agile than the previous inanimate stuffed figures and dolls, they can take on human tasks and roles. Their latest work is the very advanced “Model 3 Generative Android”: M3GAN. Of course, all this research is not just about the desire for AI, there are always precisely calculated model demonstrations that bring the viewers to the brink of sobbing – because of the huge profits that are in the project.
Model M3GAN is smartly dressed and has long straight hair, her eyes have a jerky vibrancy but are muted by waxy skin and a ghostly smile. A doll-like creature that is programmed for its owner Cady and is supposed to convey various things to her, including Jane Austen. Above all, however, M3GAN should guard and protect, physically and emotionally. She takes her job very seriously, a great-mother for whom social morality and norms are secondary, she registers disruptive factors and dangerous moments, takes care of the neighbor’s aggressive dog (and later also his mistress) and a nasty boy, Cady in abused at school. One day she is no longer willing to obediently switch off from communication.
Cinema plays out all forms of motherhood, even the horrific ones
America is less patriarchally structured than is often suggested, but in the cool new bourgeoisie the category of motherhood has hardly any place – only the cinema has always liked to play it out, especially in its radical forms: dominant, gluttonous, perverted, Medea or Ma Baker, Norman Bates and his mother, or the alien monster, has thus made up for a deficit that psychoanalysis has caused with its Oedipus mumbo-jumbo.
If the screenwriter Akela Cooper had had her way, the film would have been a lot bloodier, she wrote the script for the really evil “Malignant”. But Jason Blum and James Wan, who combined the creative forces of their production companies Blumhouse and Atomic Monster for M3GAN, didn’t want a splatter number show, no competition for the perverted Chucky or the demonic Annabelle. And they’re very successful with it, within a few days the film grossed over $50 million worldwide.
Director Gerard Johnstone has created a classic horror film and at the same time a subtle study of this strange thing: motherhood. What is a mother, are there considerations and limits for her, does one live without a mother? And of course it’s also about the existential cinema questions about the soul of the mechanical objects, what the androids dream of, can an AI being be evil? Once you see M3GAN lying lifeless on the little table at school, where the children have to deposit the toys they have brought with them… this is a spooky and also a very sad picture.
M3GAN, 2022 – directed by Gerard Johnstone. Book: Akela Cooper. Camera: Peter McCaffey, Simon Raby. Editing: Jeff McEvoy. Music: Anthony Willis. Producer: Jason Blum, James Wan. Starring: Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Ronny Chiang, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis. Universal, 102 minutes. Theatrical release: January 12, 2022.