Malignant is about Madison Lake, a woman who begins seeing visions of murders after her douchebag husband gets killed by a shadowy figure invading their home. The visions turn out to be actual killings, and so a police hunt begins. The villain is eventually revealed to be a parasitic teratoma, Gabriel, sharing a brain with Madison and acquiring full, mind-hacking, body-altering control over her during its murderous rampages. Evil Kuato from Total Recall, basically.
Here’s we arrive at the one little problem (with big consequences) with the way Malignant‘s twist is delivered.
In the movie’s third act, Madison’s sister finds an old videotape. While watching it with their mom in a great little segment of found-footage dread, they see a child Madison sitting on a hospital bed and facing the camera while doctors talk to her. The camera then moves around to her back as the main doctor discusses the need to “Cut out the cancer.” And then the movie’s money shot: Gabriel actually moving and screeching with its turd-like face just in the back of Madison’s head, with its little arms flailing about like a drunken T-Rex.
Really creepy stuff. Or so it could have been if Wan — in a puzzling moment of restraint from a notoriously overindulgent director — didn’t rather choose to cut the shot short and immediately focus on Madison’s relatives reacting to the videotape.
Using characters’ reactions to help construct an emotion is not the problem here; this is just one of the wonders of film editing and a well-known Spielbergian trick. The problem with Malignant’s specific cut from videotape to reaction is Wan not letting the shocking image of Gabriel sink in. As if he didn’t trust the power of his own reveal, Wan just cuts it way too early in order to show how the movie’s characters react, without having even given us the chance to react to it in the first place. The movie does show the evil little turd again after this reaction shot, yet the issue is that there is only one first time to show it, and once you’ve missed that key window, only diminishing returns are left, and the (now mainly vicarious) fear becomes a fraction of what it could have been.