Malignant is a film that harkens back to the origins of the horror genre. While it belongs to the horror slasher subgenre, it features grisly thrills and jumps scares that make it feel like a likely cult classic. It is a 2021 American horror film directed by James Wan and written by Akela Cooper, based on a story by Wan, Ingrid Bisu, and Cooper. Wan uses his blockbuster talents and clout to create a film that is best described as “operatic.”
Wan’s films have always been about the atmosphere, an ethereal sense of impending doom. The ghost/spirit/creature does not appear in the first scene, and it is unlikely to appear in the future. It starts off on the right foot, with an engaging build-up. Although watching the creature walk into the house in the first seconds was unexpected, Wan assured that this decision increased his grasp on the enigma.
Annabelle Wallis portrays Madison, a nervous pregnant woman who lives with an abusive husband. She begins to experience nightmares about a deformed monster murdering his victims with a weapon fashioned from a trophy. She has visions of people being murdered, only to find out that the events she sees are actually happening. Let us now take a deep dive into this fantastic film.
A New Vision of Terror – Malignant (2021)
‘Malignant’ begins twenty-seven years before the chronology in which the tale unfolds, at the Simion Research Hospital, a gothic-looking hospital. Obviously, it is a dark and stormy night which, honestly, you see a lot while watching this movie, and a group of staff members – nurses and doctors — are all working feverishly to solve the mystery of Gabriel, a mysterious patient.
“It was like he was consuming the electricity and commanding the machinery!” exclaims a character, scared and ranting about someone named Gabriel. That line appears less than five minutes into “Malignant,” and it merely gives you a sense of how insane this thing will get. During the recording, he loses control and murders a large number of the hospital staff. After seeing the bloodbath, Dr. Florence Weaver says, “It’s time to cut cancer, and the screen goes black.
We come to the present day, in Seattle, where a pregnant Madison comes home tired due to the pregnancy. Her abusive husband, Derek, decides that this is the perfect time to get into an argument with her and blames her for the prior miscarriages. He then loses control and pushes Madison roughly against the wall.
Her skull hits the wall, causing her to bleed profusely. After this, she locks herself in the bedroom and falls asleep. While she sleeps, she dreams about the hairy, deformed killer who descends on the young couple, snapping Derek’s neck.
Madison subsequently wakes up to find Derek’s body after dreaming about a man breaking into their home and killing him severely. Madison is attacked by the killer, who is still in the house, sending her hurtling through the air once more, making things even creepier.
Madison wakes up in a hospital the following day to learn from her sister, Sydney, that her unborn child did not survive the attack. After being questioned by police investigator Kekoa Shaw and his partner Regina Moss, like every character in a haunted house movie, Maddie refuses to leave her eerie old murder mansion, despite the fact that the lights keep flickering and she’s seen a ghoulish looming figure strolling around the dusty place.
She reveals to Sydney how she was adopted when she was eight and craved having a blood relationship with someone. While this is happening, our long-haired killer kidnaps a tour guide at the Seattle Underground. The Seattle Underground is actually an actual tour, and it is open to the public, so fans can definitely go and take a look at it.
The heart-pounding scenes of Maddie’s nights alone at home start becoming something more, as other murder victims appear seemingly at random around town. She starts having visions of people getting murdered. Madison sees Dr. Weavers being murdered by the killer in a dream, but she is unable to move.
Shaw and Moss, the investigating detectives, initially thought that Maddy had killed her husband. But when Dr. Weaver is found murdered in a similar fashion, they rule out the possibility. They discover a photo of a little girl who was her patient at Weaver’s house.
Shaw asks a colleague to age the photograph while Maddie starts getting visions of the killings as they happen. In a state similar to sleep paralysis, she is able to observe the killer’s activities. Every time it happens, her surroundings melt into the location of the person being murdered.
Madison gets another vision, this time of Dr. Fields being brutally murdered, just like Weaver. After seeing the killer of both her husband and Dr. Weaver murdering Dr. Fields, Madison and her sister approach the police. The police, obviously, don’t believe that she is having visions of people getting murdered in real-time.
Madison is contacted by the killer when she is at the police station and reveals himself to be Gabriel, Madison’s imaginary friend from childhood. During this scene where she is on the phone with Gabriel in the bathroom, the camera is angled so that the back of Madison’s head can be seen in a mirror, giving the impression that we are seeing her and Gabriel at the same time throughout their conversation. Once Madison and her sister leave, Shaw discovers that the girl in the photo is Madison, and her real name is Emily May.
Meanwhile, Madison and her sister go to visit Jeanne, their mother, to learn more about Gabriel. They start to unearth the horrific truth of her background as her link to the killer begins to wear her down. Madison finds out that Gabriel was not an imagined buddy but a real person she communicated with as a youngster. With this new information, Shaw discovers a link between the doctors and Madison at the precinct, leading him to Dr. Gregory’s death and an encounter with the gruesome-looking killer.
In order to access Madison’s memories, the investigators recruit the services of a cognitive hypnotherapist. Madison recalls her birth name, Emily May, and Gabriel’s desire for her to murder her pregnant sister. She was on the verge of doing it, but she managed to stop herself. Regina believes that Maddy did it, and she blames her imaginary friend instead. Just then, the kidnapped woman falls from her home’s attic, exposing that Gabriel was residing there. However, the police believe her to be the killer.
The woman who was kidnapped turns out to be Madison’s biological mother, Serena May. Since Maddie is far too gone under Gabriel’s influence and cannot defend herself, Sydney sets out to find the truth, which leads her to a long-closed children’s psychiatric facility, Simion hospital — where, amazingly, nothing bad happens to her.
Gabriel, she discovers, is Emily’s twin brother who resides in her body as an extreme version of a teratoma is a parasitic twin sharing her brain and spinal cord. Gabriel is a “teratoma,” according to Dr. Weaver. Interestingly, in Greek, the prefixes “terat-,” “terato-,” and “teras-” all indicate “monster.” And the suffix “-oma” means “tumor.” So maybe Gabriel was right when he called himself a monster.
Gabriel appeared as a half-formed youngster facing out of Emily’s back during Emily’s childhood. Dr.Weaver had operated on Emily and was able to remove the tumor in its entirety, except for a portion of the brain as it had been too dangerous to her life and functioning to remove.
Since then, he had been inactive, but he awoke when Derek pushed her and her head hit the wall. When Gabriel takes control of Madison’s body, his face appears from the back of her skull and operates her body backward, explaining the killer’s odd movements and upside-down fingerprints at his crime scenes. He gains complete control of Madison’s body after being provoked by fellow convicts in the lockup.
It is a gruesome scene where her arms turn around, and she peels the back of her skull, revealing Gabriel’s deformed face. He violently kills all the inmates and then runs to the precinct to get his weapons and clock. He murders almost the entire precinct with superhuman strength and agility, attacks Shaw and Regina, and then flees.
It comes as no surprise to see him headed towards the hospital where Serena is recovering from her captivity, making it easy for Sydney and Shaw to track him down. Gabriel attacks the two of them. Madison is highly distressed watching the entire thing as she can do nothing but watch people around her get hurt as she stands there paralyzed.
Sydney decides to try and talk to the paralyzed Madison because even if she is not in control of her body, she can still hear and observe things. She convinces Madison that Gabriel is the reason for her miscarriages because he was feeding off her fetuses. This evokes something in Madison, and she wakes up, reclaims control of her body, and sends both Gabriel and herself to a black mindscape, enraged. She locks an irate Gabriel in a cell and tells him she’ll be ready when he promises to escape one day.
Madison, now in complete control of her body and back in the hospital, lifts the hospital bed pinning Sydney to the wall claiming if Gabriel could use her body to do these inhuman tasks, then she could do it when she was conscious too. She assures Sydney that she will always love her as a sister even though they are not blood relatives. Serena smiles as the two embraces each other, making it seem like a beautiful and sweet ending. Until you hear the dim hum of the electric bulb in the room as the electricity is associated with Gabriel’s strikes.
Gabriel The Supernatural Slasher
Gabriel is our antagonist and killer in the film. Marina Mazepa, a contortionist and dancer, brings the monster to life, and his astounding physicality is hypnotizing to see. Gabriel is at the core of everything terrific about the movie, and it’s easy to see him swiftly becoming a fan favorite among James Wan’s lost list of terrifying visions. Madison and Gabriel’s situation and relationship are eerily similar to that of Edward Mordake’s. Edward Mordake was said to be a man born with two faces who isolated himself due to his abnormality. He could have very well been the inspiration behind the character.
Born to Serena May, he was a parasitic twin that shared Emily’s brain and developed arms. Serena entrusted the children to the Simion Research Hospital because of their appearance. Gabriel gained superhuman skills, such as controlling electricity, for unknown reasons. He was, nevertheless, violent and antisocial. Dr. Florence Weaver, John Gregory, and Victor Fields were eventually forced to separate Gabriel from his sister.
Gabriel murders several professors before being penalized, and the operation begins. While they were able to extract most of Gabriel’s body from Emily, the rest of him was imprisoned in the back of her mind. Emily was told that Gabriel was her imaginary buddy whenever she spoke with him telepathically after being adopted by Jeanne.
Gabriel, still determined to maintain control over his host, tries to telepathically persuade Emily (now called Madison) to execute heinous deeds such as murdering Sydney when she was still in her mother’s womb, but she resists. It is only when Derek smashes Madison’s head that he gets the opportunity to get out and gain control. Gabriel was inactive and forgotten before that.
Madison and Gabriel share all of the same abilities because Gabriel used Madison’s body to commit his crimes. Madison and Gabriel can control each other’s eyesight and hearing since they share the same brain. Gabriel can also take Madison’s body and utilize it for himself because they share the same brain. Only Gabriel, though, is capable of entirely using them.
Gabriel has the ability to manipulate and control electrical energy. He can use an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) to blow light bulbs, shatter electronic locks, and even speed up a pacemaker to the point where it overheats and explodes in a man’s heart and chest, as well as operate other machinery. Gabriel can’t speak because he lacks vocal cords, so he uses phones and radios to broadcast his thoughts as radio waves (since they are a type of electromagnetic radiation).
Despite Madison’s small stature, Gabriel is a formidable opponent. With his bare hands, he can kick through brick walls, create compound fractures with a swipe, and rip clean through a human’s torso. Gabriel was able to murder several people with his raw power, even as a toddler. Gabriel’s power may be related to his ability to switch off the human body’s limiters, allowing him to fully utilize the force that the human body is capable of.
Madison’s bones and joints can be dislocated by Gabriel, giving him exceptional flexibility and agility. Gabriel can effortlessly scale walls, avoid gunfire in a room, and fight multiple opponents at once. Gabriel goes backward a lot since he grows out of the back of Madison’s skull, and he’s quick enough to manoeuver through a room full of rubble and engage in a fight while doing so.
The emergence of Gabriel himself, who causes the entire back half of Madison’s skull to split apart as he takes over her body, is the most consistent evidence of Gabriel and Madison’s healing factor. When Gabriel withdraws from Madison’s skull, the terrible wound heals to the point that it is invisible, with just minor bleeding and headaches as side effects, and Madison is wholly unaffected in her daily activities. Madison was also beaten by the female inmates, but Gabriel is able to simply kill them, as well as everyone else in the station, seconds later.
Will There Be A ‘Malignant 2’?
Since the highly publicized premiere of the first film, both spectators and critics have speculated about the possibility of a sequel. In initial interviews about the film, Wan stated that he was not opposed to turning it into a horror series but that this was not his original objective with the first picture.
Wan compared Malignant to his infamous 2004 film Saw, saying that he originally planned it to be a single film until it fared phenomenally well in theaters and spawned a multi-layered series, implying that the same may happen with Malignant.
Fans of the original film have already expressed their desire for a sequel. That prospect is closer than ever before, thanks to the confirmations of official discussions between the director and the star given to us. Furthermore, given the film’s favorable reception, a sequel would only make sense to executives. Personally speaking, sequels tend to not be as good as the first movie, but in Wan’s hands, a sequel could be just as good a watch.