Artificial intelligence has gotten a bit of a bad rap of late, what with stealing artists' work and threatening to put writers out of business, but it's about to enter its camp era thanks to M3GAN, an all-in horror-comedy about an android doll with withering looks and prep school style, that plays like Frankenstein meets The Bad Seed for the TikTok crowd – you know, for kids.
The bad news for humanity is that this mini mecha queen – already a viral sensation thanks to a canny trailer and some bizarrely-executed dance moves – delivers a more memorable performance than most of the flesh-and-blood actors in recent memory.
That Gerard Johnstone's movie, produced by horror crowd-pleasers Jason Blum and James Wan and written, with palpable relish, by Malignant's Akela Cooper, more or less merely delivers on its marketing dot points is almost besides the point – M3GAN is, above all else, an assemblage of the finest ready-made memes you could hope for, and its star already has a clear run (give or take a Lydia Tár surge) to Halloween costume dominance come October.
