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This is one of the most batshit movies I have ever seen. My description really won't do it justice. Not only is the plot completely nuts, but so is the acting, the sets, and sometimes even the cinematography. I don't think it's a good movie, exactly, but it's an amazing experience and I sincerely recommend it. I also don't think it's a bad movie, exactly. There are aspects that are genuinely well-done. Some of those aspects are also completely insane. I've honestly never seen anything quite like it. As soon as I finished watching it I began plotting to watch it with other people.
Part of what makes Malignant such a bizarre experience is that, after a pulp horror opening and a gross title sequence, the entire first half of the movie is odd and off-kilter, but in a subtle way. The entire second half is not subtle at all.
It's most fun if you're completely unspoiled, so if you want to enjoy the full Malignant experience, stop reading now. There will be a second "stop reading here" warning for the second half, after which everything goes under a cut.
Content notes: Standard horror movie gore/violence, domestic violence, a miscarriage. There's no eye trauma that I recall - the poster is an allusion to the heroine seeing through the eyes of a killer a la The Eyes of Laura Mars.
The movie begins with a bang, in a fantastically Gothic hospital where doctors and staff are being massacred by a patient named Gabriel who can control electricity. In case we don't get it, someone screams, "He's drinking the electricity!"
Gabriel makes noises like a velociraptor and projects his voice over speakers, saying stuff like "I will kill you all!"
"My God!" someone gasps. "He speaks!"
There's screaming and bone-snapping and blood flying! Dr. Weaver says he has to be killed: "THE CANCER MUST BE REMOVED!!!"
Credits! They have lots of surgical imagery and are gross.
28 years later, our heroine Madison is pregnant and living with her abusive asshole husband in a big Gothic house, very suitable for hauntings. He bangs her head against the wall until she bleeds; she passes out, he goes downstairs, the electricity goes wibbly, he's attacked by someone hanging from the ceiling, she goes down and finds his body, and the killer attacks her. She wakes up in a hospital, where her sister Sydney tells her she lost the baby.
Madison moves back into the house, where the electricity continues to be wibbly. She has weird visions of people being murdered, which turn out to be real. A tour guide who gives tours of the underground town beneath Seattle which is apparently a real thing is kidnapped and kept prisoner, while other people are just killed. The two cops who interviewed Madison about her husband's death investigate these murders and kidnapping.
Okay. This part sounds like fairly straightforward supernatural horror about a woman who has a mysterious connection to a killer. But the way it plays is really strange, in ways where it's hard to convey just how peculiar everything is.
The police station is a gigantic open plan office with ceilings like a cathedral, brutalist architecture, and floor-to-ceiling windows in an ornate pattern. If I saw it without context, I'd think it was either a church, an art gallery, or an expensive artisanal gastropub.
After Madison comes home from the hospital, she locks herself in. Her sister Sydney surprises her by climbing in a window... into a room on the second floor! They then have an extremely odd conversation in which Madison says, with no preamble and in a way which made me burst out laughing, "Sydney, I'm adopted."
The age difference (eight years) does make it possible for Sydney to not know, but it plays as so weird. It's plot-relevant that she was adopted and has no memories prior to age eight, but there has got to be a more graceful way of dropping that in.
One of the murder victims, who is a wealthy doctor, lives across from a gigantic red neon sign so his apartment is always bathed in red light.
Another murder victim, also a wealthy doctor, has a shelf of DOCTOR TROPHY CUPS with inscriptions like BEST SURGEON.
All the white women in the movie have the same haircut (very long with bangs straight across the forehead.)
The dialogue is all slightly stilted in a peculiar way, both in writing and in speech.
Here is where the truly batshit spoilers begin. Seriously, this movie is amazing experienced unspoiled.
We learn that Madison was given up at birth, and adopted by a couple who found her creepy because she had an imaginary friend named Gabriel. Gabriel told her to do bad things, like stand over her sleeping parents with a knife. So she got adopted again.
The killer is now identified as Gabriel. We haven't seen his face, but he has long hair and is extremely extra. Madison is regularly seeing his kills, and she sometimes wakes up with blood on the pillow that she attributes to her husband banging her head against the wall however long ago that was. At this point, I'm pretty convinced that Madison has a split personality, and unbeknownst to her, she is Gabriel.
And then! The cops decide to hypnotize her at her house! So while all the major characters are gathered at her house, suddenly and without warning a body crashes through the ceiling and lands at everyone's feet! There's an amazing long shot like something out of a traditional murder mystery as they all form a tableau staring down at it in astonishment.
The tour guide who was kidnapped way back in Act I was in Madison's attic all along, and crashed through the ceiling!
And she's Madison's birth mother!
The cops promptly arrest Madison and toss her in a jail cell. She is in there with a large group of women who are dressed like they're in a 70s disco biker exploitation flick. Like, they have bell bottoms and everything. For no reason they attack and beat Madison.
AND THEN.
Madison's head starts bleeding! The back of her head splits open and a creepy face becomes visible! She starts attacking the 70s disco exploitation prisoners, walking backwards! GABRIEL IS HER PARASITIC TWIN!!!!!
We then get a flashback to her childhood in the hospital. She sadly says that Gabriel is bad. The camera pans and reveals the most ridiculous horror puppet I have ever seen. It's Gabriel the parasitic twin glued to her back, with a skull/fetus face and teeny tiny sticklike arms that he flaps like a T-rex! He paws the air and makes velociraptor noises!
It was Gabriel who, attached to her back, murdered all the doctors! It was Gabriel who was the cancer who was surgically removed!
(Don't ask why no one ever noticed the MASSIVE scarring Madison would have on her back.)
Gabriel proceeds to massacre the 70s disco prisoners and escape. The way he moves is actually very cool, because his face is at the back of Madison's head, so he moves backward (from her perspective).
So, when I said some aspects of the movie were kind of good? The foreshadowing! It's actually very well done if you see the movie a second time, complete with her head bleeding. When her husband bashed her head, he released Gabriel! LITERALLY! HE BROKE HER SCALP OPEN AND REVEALED GABRIEL'S FACE AND HE TOOK OVER! And that's why her head kept bleeding - it wasn't the victims' blood, it was from Gabriel's face emerging! (I guess she has magical scalp resealing powers?)
Meanwhile, Sydney decides to drive to the Gothic hospital to get Madison's records. She speeds madly to the abandoned hospital, parks her car right at the edge of a cliff for no reason, runs inside, and finds all the medical records that have been sitting there for 28 years.
Armed with this knowledge, she goes to confront Madison/Gabriel. Gabriel is having a grand old time slaughtering all the cops at the artisanal gastropubstation. in the middle of this, he hurls a chair at a random cop. I can't explain how absolutely hilarious that was.
Somehow Sydney and Madison end up at a hospital... oh right, it's because Gabriel came to kill the birth mother who fell through the ceiling.
Sydney, trying to awaken Madison, screams, "HE ATE YOUR FETUS!"
Yes! Gabriel devoured her fetus in the womb! That's why she had multiple miscarriages and lost her baby!
Madison wakes up and has a confrontation with Gabriel in a mindscape. "Did you forget we share the same brain?" she says.
She locks him up for good inside her mind... or does she?
I regret to say that this summary really doesn't do justice to the absolute bizarreness that is this movie. The plot is only about half of how nuts it is.
Like at one point there's a childhood flashback to what is supposed to be an ordinary, nice family. The mother, reminiscing about when a kid was eight or nine, says, "You wanted a birthday party so much, you nagged us until your father gave in."
Why is a kid having a birthday party presented as this huge and unusual favor the kid needs to beg for?
The whole movie is like that. Things that shouldn't be weird are weird. Characters who should be normal are slightly off. Dialogue is written and delivered oddly. Parking a car is inexplicably bizarre. The architecture of everything is incredibly weird. But the budget is high, it's shot beautifully, and a great deal of care was clearly lavished on this completely fucking bonkers movie.
Part of what makes Malignant such a bizarre experience is that, after a pulp horror opening and a gross title sequence, the entire first half of the movie is odd and off-kilter, but in a subtle way. The entire second half is not subtle at all.
It's most fun if you're completely unspoiled, so if you want to enjoy the full Malignant experience, stop reading now. There will be a second "stop reading here" warning for the second half, after which everything goes under a cut.
Content notes: Standard horror movie gore/violence, domestic violence, a miscarriage. There's no eye trauma that I recall - the poster is an allusion to the heroine seeing through the eyes of a killer a la The Eyes of Laura Mars.
The movie begins with a bang, in a fantastically Gothic hospital where doctors and staff are being massacred by a patient named Gabriel who can control electricity. In case we don't get it, someone screams, "He's drinking the electricity!"
Gabriel makes noises like a velociraptor and projects his voice over speakers, saying stuff like "I will kill you all!"
"My God!" someone gasps. "He speaks!"
There's screaming and bone-snapping and blood flying! Dr. Weaver says he has to be killed: "THE CANCER MUST BE REMOVED!!!"
Credits! They have lots of surgical imagery and are gross.
28 years later, our heroine Madison is pregnant and living with her abusive asshole husband in a big Gothic house, very suitable for hauntings. He bangs her head against the wall until she bleeds; she passes out, he goes downstairs, the electricity goes wibbly, he's attacked by someone hanging from the ceiling, she goes down and finds his body, and the killer attacks her. She wakes up in a hospital, where her sister Sydney tells her she lost the baby.
Madison moves back into the house, where the electricity continues to be wibbly. She has weird visions of people being murdered, which turn out to be real. A tour guide who gives tours of the underground town beneath Seattle which is apparently a real thing is kidnapped and kept prisoner, while other people are just killed. The two cops who interviewed Madison about her husband's death investigate these murders and kidnapping.
Okay. This part sounds like fairly straightforward supernatural horror about a woman who has a mysterious connection to a killer. But the way it plays is really strange, in ways where it's hard to convey just how peculiar everything is.
The police station is a gigantic open plan office with ceilings like a cathedral, brutalist architecture, and floor-to-ceiling windows in an ornate pattern. If I saw it without context, I'd think it was either a church, an art gallery, or an expensive artisanal gastropub.
After Madison comes home from the hospital, she locks herself in. Her sister Sydney surprises her by climbing in a window... into a room on the second floor! They then have an extremely odd conversation in which Madison says, with no preamble and in a way which made me burst out laughing, "Sydney, I'm adopted."
The age difference (eight years) does make it possible for Sydney to not know, but it plays as so weird. It's plot-relevant that she was adopted and has no memories prior to age eight, but there has got to be a more graceful way of dropping that in.
One of the murder victims, who is a wealthy doctor, lives across from a gigantic red neon sign so his apartment is always bathed in red light.
Another murder victim, also a wealthy doctor, has a shelf of DOCTOR TROPHY CUPS with inscriptions like BEST SURGEON.
All the white women in the movie have the same haircut (very long with bangs straight across the forehead.)
The dialogue is all slightly stilted in a peculiar way, both in writing and in speech.
Here is where the truly batshit spoilers begin. Seriously, this movie is amazing experienced unspoiled.
We learn that Madison was given up at birth, and adopted by a couple who found her creepy because she had an imaginary friend named Gabriel. Gabriel told her to do bad things, like stand over her sleeping parents with a knife. So she got adopted again.
The killer is now identified as Gabriel. We haven't seen his face, but he has long hair and is extremely extra. Madison is regularly seeing his kills, and she sometimes wakes up with blood on the pillow that she attributes to her husband banging her head against the wall however long ago that was. At this point, I'm pretty convinced that Madison has a split personality, and unbeknownst to her, she is Gabriel.
And then! The cops decide to hypnotize her at her house! So while all the major characters are gathered at her house, suddenly and without warning a body crashes through the ceiling and lands at everyone's feet! There's an amazing long shot like something out of a traditional murder mystery as they all form a tableau staring down at it in astonishment.
The tour guide who was kidnapped way back in Act I was in Madison's attic all along, and crashed through the ceiling!
And she's Madison's birth mother!
The cops promptly arrest Madison and toss her in a jail cell. She is in there with a large group of women who are dressed like they're in a 70s disco biker exploitation flick. Like, they have bell bottoms and everything. For no reason they attack and beat Madison.
AND THEN.
Madison's head starts bleeding! The back of her head splits open and a creepy face becomes visible! She starts attacking the 70s disco exploitation prisoners, walking backwards! GABRIEL IS HER PARASITIC TWIN!!!!!
We then get a flashback to her childhood in the hospital. She sadly says that Gabriel is bad. The camera pans and reveals the most ridiculous horror puppet I have ever seen. It's Gabriel the parasitic twin glued to her back, with a skull/fetus face and teeny tiny sticklike arms that he flaps like a T-rex! He paws the air and makes velociraptor noises!
It was Gabriel who, attached to her back, murdered all the doctors! It was Gabriel who was the cancer who was surgically removed!
(Don't ask why no one ever noticed the MASSIVE scarring Madison would have on her back.)
Gabriel proceeds to massacre the 70s disco prisoners and escape. The way he moves is actually very cool, because his face is at the back of Madison's head, so he moves backward (from her perspective).
So, when I said some aspects of the movie were kind of good? The foreshadowing! It's actually very well done if you see the movie a second time, complete with her head bleeding. When her husband bashed her head, he released Gabriel! LITERALLY! HE BROKE HER SCALP OPEN AND REVEALED GABRIEL'S FACE AND HE TOOK OVER! And that's why her head kept bleeding - it wasn't the victims' blood, it was from Gabriel's face emerging! (I guess she has magical scalp resealing powers?)
Meanwhile, Sydney decides to drive to the Gothic hospital to get Madison's records. She speeds madly to the abandoned hospital, parks her car right at the edge of a cliff for no reason, runs inside, and finds all the medical records that have been sitting there for 28 years.
Armed with this knowledge, she goes to confront Madison/Gabriel. Gabriel is having a grand old time slaughtering all the cops at the artisanal gastropubstation. in the middle of this, he hurls a chair at a random cop. I can't explain how absolutely hilarious that was.
Somehow Sydney and Madison end up at a hospital... oh right, it's because Gabriel came to kill the birth mother who fell through the ceiling.
Sydney, trying to awaken Madison, screams, "HE ATE YOUR FETUS!"
Yes! Gabriel devoured her fetus in the womb! That's why she had multiple miscarriages and lost her baby!
Madison wakes up and has a confrontation with Gabriel in a mindscape. "Did you forget we share the same brain?" she says.
She locks him up for good inside her mind... or does she?
I regret to say that this summary really doesn't do justice to the absolute bizarreness that is this movie. The plot is only about half of how nuts it is.
Like at one point there's a childhood flashback to what is supposed to be an ordinary, nice family. The mother, reminiscing about when a kid was eight or nine, says, "You wanted a birthday party so much, you nagged us until your father gave in."
Why is a kid having a birthday party presented as this huge and unusual favor the kid needs to beg for?
The whole movie is like that. Things that shouldn't be weird are weird. Characters who should be normal are slightly off. Dialogue is written and delivered oddly. Parking a car is inexplicably bizarre. The architecture of everything is incredibly weird. But the budget is high, it's shot beautifully, and a great deal of care was clearly lavished on this completely fucking bonkers movie.
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Underground city in Seattle is a real thing, with real tours, and it is interesting but not as thrilling as one hopes going in.
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What.
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The whole movie is like that, and, as Rachel said, full of bizarre dialogue and stylistic choices and things that just don't make sense but in such a passing casual way that you almost don't care (e.g. the mental hospital abandoned for decades that has exactly the files the protagonists need, still in an intact and readable form) in a movie which has a bizarre puppetmaster-style backward-moving serial killer that flips Madison's body around and does Matrix-style acrobatic fight scenes with her joints bending the wrong way ... except it's not just one weird/nonsensical thing, it's at least one and usually two or three per scene. Or people doing perfectly ordinary things in a bizarre, ominous, and portentous way, for no reason.
And there's some stuff that is genuinely well set up, like the blood on Madison's pillow which appears to come from her head wound (from her husband hitting her against the wall) repeatedly breaking open, or the shots of the weird Gothic place where the Seattle Underground lady is being held hostage being in the same location as the relatively ordinary house where the other action takes place - in the long shots, you can actually see the big stained glass window or whatever it is that casts moody lighting on the lady-being-tortured scenes ... except when you get to thinking about any of this, it doesn't make sense. Like why the hell the house is 90% ordinary and 10% gothic attic, no one seems to know the attic exists, and no one heard someone screaming for help for days while perfectly ordinary life went on downstairs.
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Are you sure though.
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(Edited to add: this was intended as a comment to the main post, it is not specifically the hereditary hairstyles I meant)
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On the grounds that three examples make a genre, I have been looking for a third film with a person-eating piano after House and Barbarella, but no luck so far.
Those are also both movies a lot of people think are bad that I unironically enjoy. As I said, House plays as though it was made by someone who had never seen a movie before-- and the type of film this person was asked to make was a feminist horror movie. It's on my list of Most Feminist Horror Movies along with various Peter Strickland and Jennifer's Body. But it's also worth seeing just for the experience, which is unforgettable.
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Perhaps it's better not to know, but I WANT to.
P.
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The actual plot-relevant weirdness is of course amazing, but it really is the strangeness saturated throughout that makes it extra-bizarre. I'm not convinced it wasn't secretly assembled by an alien unfamiliar with human behavior.
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