Malignant 4K 2021 Ultra HD 2160p

A girl named Madison's life turns into a real nightmare, paralyzing and shocking when she witnesses brutal murders in her dreams. But what if the night visions are actually a brutal reality? Does Madison have a chance to prevent them?

Malignant 4K Review
James Wan has not always been what ordinary audiences know him to be. Before working on mainstream (which is not the same as bad, mind you) franchises about the Warren family and travel to the Astral, he made wild genre movies on his knees. It's not just about Saw, of course - although Hollywood's leading horror director was really twisting and turning, trying to piece together a violent thriller about a survival game over several sleepless days in an abandoned warehouse. The cameramen banged their heads on pipes and low ceilings, the group had to huddle in a cramped corner during the shooting, and in the editing process it became clear that the film lacks a few scenes. On the sets of "Spellbound" or "Fast and Furious," rest assured, you won't find stories like that.

But there was also a debut work in Wang's filmography, "Inferno." It premiered at the Melbourne Underground Festival alongside such films as Masked Avenger vs. the ultra-villain in a den of nude bikinis (aka The Masturbating Gunman) or Narcosis (a slapstick version of The Matrix). The picture is nowhere to be found, but according to lucky eyewitnesses, the Australian director made a low-budget phantasmagorical movie with plenty of practical effects - as silly as it is charming. Twenty-one years later, Van is releasing his new film Malignant (the original Malignant is "Malignant" or "Maleficent," two perfectly valid localized titles, one of which even somewhat resembles the Stygian debut title) in an attempt to gain strength between filming Aquaman and Aquaman 2. Again, a phantasmagorical movie with oodles of practical effects - as, you might guess, silly as it is charming.

The setup is the most atypical of Van's filmography. Madison (Annabelle Wallis), who has lost her child after being attacked by a mysterious monster (it had also killed her abusive husband before that), is discharged from hospital. Friends and policemen alike say that the culprit will be found, but the girl is convinced that the monster still roams the house and will not stop until it gets to her. Every night creepy sounds come from the first floor, shadows run along the walls, and soon Madison will begin to fall into an ominous trance: from the side, unable to move from her seat, she will watch as the creature kills other people in different parts of the city.

"Malignant" could well have been another haunted house horror flick, but Wang had apparently had enough of studio projects with, yes, conventional stories. It was time to take a risk. In general, the director himself positions the film as a very personal and, in general, not without a double bottom: firstly, it is based on the reflection after the death of his father from cancer, and secondly, Wang considers "Malignant" a pro-feminist film about liberation. Both are true-all of this can be found, dissected, interpreted, eventually, if you're not too lazy, even made into some elaborate video essay.

Only you don't really want to. These themes, of course, are important, but paradoxically, no matter how much the director wants to bring them to the fore, they remain behind the screen of Vanovian formalism. The director's films, frankly, have never been known for meticulously elaborated subtexts: Van's art is palpable, tabloid, in short, assembled from a bunch of clichés, templates and childhood movie memories (in the case of Wicked, about jallos and slashers). When all the twists in the film resemble plot twists from soap operas or cheap '80s horror movies, it's probably hard to really think about emancipation. Which isn't too bad, though - it's more quirky and offbeat, given the tendencies of modern horror, which tends to have complex subtexts and, shall we say, "artfulness.

Van is not at all close to this. He is an old-school director - an adherent of practical effects, a fan of shocking scenes of violence, and simply a creator who thinks in terms of plasticity rather than the metaphysics of the genre. In Evil, his interest in the "how" rather than the "what" is much more noticeable - after the Hollywood studio period the director was given carte blanche and, to be fair, he took full advantage of it. From playing with genres ("Malignant" opens as a haunted house movie, then mimics a slasher and then a hideous slasher and even an action movie) to purely visual choices like animatronics and cameras swirling around the characters.

The further the plot of Evil develops, the crazier the movie becomes. Vertebrae and scalps ripped out, broken legs and ribs, human mutations and bloody nightmares - it is extremely difficult to talk about this film in detail so as not to spoil anything; only descriptions, interjections and generalities remain. But it's also what perfectly characterizes Wang's new independent work (compared to "Spells" and "Aquaman" for sure). You want to think about it not in terms of meanings and subtexts, but with a kind of childlike enthusiasm: "Did you see how he killed him?", "Do you remember that scene?", "Did you notice how the camera moves?" Surprisingly, of course, the film, which was intended to be a feminist genre revelation (along with Van the screenwriters are two women), turned into yet another reminder that at heart we are still children.