Malignant (2021)

James Wan's Malignant arrives with the confidence of a director who has decided that coherence is for other people. A woman named Madison, played by Annabelle Wallis, is battered by her husband, begins witnessing murders in her sleep, and eventually learns that her parasitic twin brother lives folded inside her skull and has been doing the killing with her limbs. The film is a giallo pastiche, soaked in Argento and lit like a fever, and it plays its absurdities with a straight face that borders on the sublime. Critics split. Audiences shrugged. The thing has since become a cult object, which is the correct fate for a movie this committed to its own bad taste.

On the ledger of social consciousness, the film is nearly blank, and this is a feature of its construction. The cast is mixed, with Michole Briana White appearing as one of two investigating detectives, but the diversity is ambient and never becomes a subject. Nobody comments on it. Nobody is asked to. The picture has no interest in race, class, or climate, and no interest in the moral instruction those themes so often carry. There is no LGBTQ presence, no historical revision, no argument about bodies and how we ought to feel about them. The body horror on display is monstrosity, a tumor with a voice, and it is presented as exactly that.

A feminist reading is available if we squint. Madison is brutalized by a man, then reclaims her own flesh from the brother squatting in it. But this is the grammar of the genre, not a thesis. Wan is not preaching. He is staging a jailbreak inside a woman's spine. The result is a rarity, a horror film with nothing to teach us and no interest in trying.