'M3GAN' Review: A Robot-Doll Sci-Fi Horror Movie That's Scary, Absurd, and Confusing

The main character of "M3GAN", a deviously absurd and satirical sci-fi horror film also somewhat clever, is a beautiful scary android doll from hell that doesn't look like other spooky movie toys. Her soft, placid features – the oversized light gray eyes, smooth alabaster skin, mouth that smiles, pouts and signals approval or displeasure – have been enhanced with a thick layer of digital effects, but there's a real actor underneath named Amie Donald, and that helps set this humanoid in his own weird valley. You could say that M3GAN, as a character, reaches the apotheosis of the doll. She looks completely fake and completely real at the same time.

Gemma (Allison Williams), a robotics engineer, works for the Funki Toy company, where she spends her time designing gadgets like PurrpetualPetz, a programmed fuzz ball that eats, poops, and makes sarcastic comments. But Gemma has bigger dreams. She embezzled $100,000 of the company's money to create the prototype of M3GAN (short for Model 3 Generative Android), building it from a metal skeleton, silicone skin, lasers, radar and a highly developed artificial intelligence that allows him to speak like the world's wittiest Siri companion. (Her voice, a sweet, knowingly innocent girl-next-door, is provided by Jenna Davis.)

If "M3GAN" had a whisper of subtlety, it would tease the question of whether M3GAN has a mind of its own. But the movie shows you right off the bat that she definitely does. With her impressive encyclopedic knowledge of everything, combined with her ability to respond to you like a surrogate parent, soulful best friend, self-actualizing therapist, evil conspirator, or musical songbird who, if you're depressed, will serenade you with a soft-rock rendition of "Titanium", M3GAN is like HAL 9000 meets a lost Olsen sister meets Chucky. When the action starts to heat up, it's invested with an unseen sinister quality, like one of those Diane Arbus twins from "The Shining" crossed with the Terminator. If things don't go her way, she'll get very angry, but she'll do it with a hint of attitude, like when she says to the bully harassing Cady, "That's the part where you run ."

"M3GAN", as you may have understood, is too steeped in models from the pop culture, but in its trivial way, it's an entertaining genre film, with a healthy sense of its own absurdity. Movies released in the first week of January tend to share a total throwaway quality, but "M3GAN" almost feels like it could be a cult movie, the kind of thriller that generates a small but dedicated audience and maybe a sequel or two. You don't have to take the film seriously to enjoy it as a very kitsch cautionary tale in a time when technology, especially for children, is becoming the new company.

Williams, who is one of the film's executive producers (its two high-powered producer-writers are James Wan and Jason Blum), invests Gemma with a winning, sometimes flippant hyperrationality that makes her both the film's heroine and its rather innocent digital-age Dr. Frankenstein. Gemma, an obsessive robotics prodigy, had been ordered by her boss to abandon the M3GAN project. But the film opens with a (man-made) cataclysm that pushes her to move forward in secret. His young niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), is on a ski trip with her parents when, in a freak accident, their car is hit by a snowplow.

Gemma takes custody of the newly orphaned girl, and while she seems completely adrift on what someone Cady's age might need (like, say, a bedtime story), her failure as a babysitter is part of the film's satirical design. "M3GAN" is set in a world - namely our own - where parents, lamenting the amount of screen time they give their children, still give in to the impulse, because it feels both easy and inevitable. The film says that we are already letting computer technology raise our children. M3GAN the svelte programmed companion that always says the perfect thing becomes the logical outcome of this trend.

Once Cady prints her fingers into the palm of M3GAN, which automatically programs the doll so that she becomes his special companion, their relationship makes everything else boring, at least for Cady. The film parallels their island friendship...