Poster for Malevolent (2018)

Sadly as often happens this time of year, the start of term is bulldozing my schedule, leaving my Mythic Bastionland game in an all-too-familiar gaming limbo. I suspect it will not resume, though I enjoyed it a lot and hope, if it does not get going again, that I can at least share some summary thoughts here soon. In the meantime, I am sharing something else I wrote: Last night on a whim I watched Netflix’s 2018 horror film Malevolent. Afterward, as I tried to sort out what I thought about it, I ended up putting those thoughts to writing. I do not consider myself an expert on movies nor a particularly insightful review writer, but I figured I’d share it anyway for the sake of conversation.

This review is rife with spoilers so if you think you’d have any interest in watching this movie at all and don’t want to know how it ends, you’ve been warned: Stop reading. It also spoils key moments from the movie Alien, and in fact if you haven’t seen Alien the thing to take away from this review is that you should go watch that instead.

The most generous thing I will say about this movie is it seems to have some kind of thematic throughline even if I have to squint to see it. A figure repeated throughout the film is the inscrutable family member – someone who, despite their emotional proximity, lapses without warning into the abhorrent. The main characters, Jackson and Angela, grew up with this figure in their mother who, after bringing them into the world, went mad and eventually killed herself, leaving her family with insurmountable pain and no answers.

Malevolent follows Angela and Jackson as young adults, capitalizing on the tragedy of their mother’s death and claims of having second sight to make a business of conning mourners with phony exorcisms. Their business plan encounters two wrinkles: first, Angela has begun to witness strange happenings on the job that no one else can see. Were her mother’s ravings of spirits true, or is Angela experiencing the first glimpses of the madness that claimed her life? Among Angela’s growing misgivings about her work, the company are called to an old country manor supposedly haunted by the spirits of girls horribly murdered within its walls.

The siblings’ tragedy is propelled onward by Jackson, a walking car crash of a human being. In debt to his grandfather and some violent thugs, the payout from this job for Jackson is a matter of life and death. His relationship with his sister is complicated, and the movie’s failure to sell their dynamic, or indeed much of anything about Jackson, might be its greatest failing. Throughout most of the film his behaviour is monstrous: he is charming, but his charisma is cast almost exclusively in the light of his nonstop manipulation of everyone around him - his marks, his girlfriend, his cameraman, his sister, and his late mother’s memory. It is not hard to believe that these people could be pulled in by him – this, at least, he sells – but where the movie does not stretch credulity it does tax this viewer’s good will. Jackson’s lack of shame, empathy, or basic respect for his companions, hollows out the underlying love between him and Angela meant to act as an emotional core for the film’s climax. It is not that sibling love can’t be messy, but rather that this pair’s underlying bond is so unconvincing it is hard to care.

Flatness is a recurrent issue with Malevolent’s characters. Like Jackson, the woman who recruits his band to exorcise her ghosts, one Mrs. Green, spends so much of her screentime being awful that it is hard take her seriously, or feel much for her besides contempt. Despite a strong performance from Celia Imre, Mrs. Green’s writing does not give viewers much to work with, and the results cast her as one-dimensionally evil. We learn that the grisly murders now haunting her house were her own doing, and in her sudden transformation into the movie’s primary villain she repeats the tortures she inflicted on the girls on her new victims. The reasons for her original crimes are unclear: a possessive love of her son, perhaps, with a mix of good old cartoon madness. The torture – sewing her victims’ mouths shut so they can’t tell of it – is grisly and, when brought to bear upon Angela et al., all the more baffling given Greene’s apparent intention to kill them immediately thereafter.

Indeed, Malevolent is unrelentingly dark. It is excessively so: it rushes breathlessly between the personal misery of its protagonists, their doomed misadventures, and a central mystery steeped in almost absurd cruelty and violence. Watching these things unfold left me feeling quite numb; I did not believe that the characters deserved their suffering per se, but it quickly lost its meaning with so little else to imbue them with a sense of life or, indeed, to suggest that they would do or ever had done anything besides suffer. If you are struggling to imagine what this is like, imagine a version of Alien where not only does the cat not make it, but it has been dead since before the movie started. Without room to breathe, the film’s ceaseless barrage of misery never finds the grounding it needs to attain the level of tragedy or, indeed, horror. These entail a sense of loss, which demands having something to lose.

Shortcomings at the levels of the film’s writing, direction, and much of its acting, undercut its ability to convincingly explore its central theme: the unknowability of other people, even those we love the most. Like Angela and Jackson’s mother, Mrs. Greene pivots on a mix of trauma and pure madness. Her mother, she tells us in a rather contrived moment of exposition, was no stranger to violence and mutilation in disciplining her misbehaving children. Greene uses this explanation as pretense for her own adventures in corporal punishment, and I would not go so far as to call the lack of further explanation a plot hole: the violence is self-propagating, a kind of haunting of its own possessing generation after generation. This parallels the protagonists’ mother’s madness, or her “gift”, which casts doubt on Angela’s lucidity both in the form of her own self-image and her brother’s cruel manipulations.

However, the film is unable to root this madness in a kind of humanity, nor even in the realm of genre. The story’s hollowness is most pronounced during the climax, when Angela is saved by the very ghosts she was hired to remove. With Mrs. Greene on the verge of taking yet another victim, the dead girls open their spectral mouths and scream, finally breaking the silence forced upon them by their killer’s needle and thread. But what is this scream? If a function of Angela’s psychic gift it’s unprecedented, and as a moment of catharsis it makes little sense. If there is supposed to be an emotional metaphysics at work here, I don’t understand it. What about this latest crime is so much worse than the others that it breaks down the barriers between living and dead? Or else, what bond between Angela and the girls is supposed to be so powerful as to give them back their voice? More than anything the ghosts seem a mirror for the audience, fed up with this pointless cruelty and ready to call it a night.