Madison Mitchell (Annabelle Wallis) begins to have waking nightmares of horrific and grisly murders. The only thing that can make matters worse is that these are not dreams but visions of actual events as they are happening. 

Opening with video footage from within a mental hospital in 1993, we bare witness to an experiment gone wrong before we jump back to the present. Madison, heavily pregnant is assaulted by her abusive husband before a home invasion results in his death and her miscarriage. We are then presented with multiple threads of story revolving around a police investigation from detectives Moss and Shaw (Michole Briana White and George Young), a look into Madison’s past with her sister Sidney (Maddie Hasson) and a tour guide (Jean Louisa Kelly) of Seattle’s underground city. As the threads slowly coalesce the bodies pile up all around our protagonists. 

Malignant is a film with an extremely heightened sense of storytelling that you will either find laughable or love completely. We are immediately given a sense of what to expect in the opening scene set in 1993. The entire sequence features writing, acting and framing that feels like the extreme of what you would expect of a horror movie. To some extent it’s an operatic parody of one. Fans of comedy Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace would have some sense of what to expect but with greater production values. From this point on the entire purpose of the film seems to be to include as many horror tropes as possible and “dial them up to eleven”. Scary houses, abandoned mental asylums, grisly murders, electronic equipment going haywire and dark secrets are all present and correct. 

All of this seems like a perfectly obvious direction for co-story creator and director James Wan to head in. In between making modern horror behemoths such as Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring he has also made crowd pleasing blockbusters in Fast & Furious 7 and Aquaman. And if you take the high octane over the top story and action motifs from those blockbusters and tie them together with the dark and slickly designed horror films then Malignant is the perfect homogeneous blend of the two. Something that almost neatly ties in with the genuinely brilliantly delivered “a-ha” moment at the end of this film! 

If you like horror films and can dial into the exaggerated tone of Malignant you will have an absolutely wild ride. Otherwise you may just find yourself laughing and believing it to be purely amateurish. 

Personally I had an absolutely joyous time taking in everything the film throws at you.