James Wan is a driver of fear and in many ways. I’ll see Insidious or He Conjuring, and it’s easy to imagine the conductor standing in front of the screen as if he were an orchestra, with the baton in his hand, guiding the stings of the staccato violin, yes, but also the general rise and fall of tension, and perhaps the predatory movements of the camera as it goes around the corners and becomes petrified close-ups. However, perhaps it’s just as easy to imagine Wan standing next to the mountain, pulling a lever to get a few teenage cars screaming up a steep, rickety track. It makes music from the scare of the humble leap and turns multiplexes into fun houses, like William’s castle for the era of digital ghosts. He behaviors horror. For either definition, this involves some ribs.
Wan’s new film, Malignant, is more a walk than a symphony. But it is a journey to remember. The film returns its director to its original genre with helmsman after a stage in the CGI waters of comic film. The opening frames make this landfall literally literal, as we shell the surface of a choppy sea to find a surely haunted hospital that rises up the cliff above like a Transylvanian manor. Over the next two hours, Wan will sink through his bag of tricks with a renewed sense of diabolical purpose: zooming in through spices, looking from inside the washing machines, tearing down aisles, and pushing invasively into the pale faces of its actors. When a gust of wind pulls back the curtain of an open window, revealing the imposing spectacle it previously hid, one can almost see the director’s superimposed skeletal smile, cracking his rudimentary but experienced gag.
Inside this medical center, seen in a violent prologue and later returned for expository purposes, hides a clashing ghost: a poltergeist with the knife habits of Jason Voorhees, the limbernesa of Ray Park and the telephone records of a serial killer who mocks the authorities. A couple of decades after biting some orders, the shadow-clad “Gabriel” has reappeared to start hacking and shrinking again. (It’s like Wan himself, expanded to return to the business of chaos.) The demon’s recreation begins at the home of a Madison Mitchell, who loses her son to be born.“The last in a line of miscarriages,” along with her abusive husband in the attack. From here, it will be absorbed by one psychic link-sleep paralysis with the killer, his consciousness forced to witness helplessly each of the brutal killings that follow.
Poor and shaky Madison is played by Annabelle Wallis, who previously dodged another of Wan’s malevolent toys, the possessed doll who shared his first name. She telegraphs what any intelligent spectator will immediately intuit: that beauty and the beast have history. Could it have anything to do with Madison’s true family background? Or that habit that kids have of making horror movies to make friends not so imaginative? For a while, Malignant it appears to be just an inch from the Blumhouse boiler in the stories department. The supporting characters have the full dimension of Halloween decorations: skeptical detectives; the nerdy CSI agent who is like a relative of the magic of these annoying comic reliefs Insidious mates; The devout sister of the Madison actress (Maddie Hasson, who bears a distractingly strange resemblance to Florence Pugh). We believe, at least for a while, that we have already inhaled the humid air of this crypt.
But Malignant it has surprises up its sleeve. As it becomes more naked, thicker, the script points out the audience’s familiarity with the troops of haunted houses that Wan helped popularize. Our reward for the healthy help of the background story, which is delivered through long scenes of characters watching VHS grenade tapes, is a diabolical revelation that changes the madness of the film by several scales. Malignant it does more than redirect squandering talent on green screens painted wavy blue in post-production. It also frees Wan from Sunday school of his most elegant Conjurings. This is not a film with any pretensions of Catholic seriousness. He is more disconcerting in his tactics and pulls out the filmmaker Amityville horror and reconnecting him with his skin roots piercing his bones like Jigsaw’s father. There is a touch of giallo in the red of the lighting and arterial spray and in the police investigation dialogue on the case. And the film takes to the forefront the influence of Sam Raimi who hid as a repressed memory in Wan-style eco-rooms. What is your endless walking camera, after all, but a less caffeine version of this demonic POV that starts at warp speed The Evil Deadthe neck of the forest?
Regardless of your math on the proportion of fun and muteness Aquaman, there is no way to see this bewildered follow-up and not to conclude that Wan has returned to where he belongs. Still, some of that time in the superhero trenches seems to have crept into his supernatural comeback. Malignant it’s a creepy psychodramatic that, here and there, becomes a bloody action hilarity, as if Pazuzu had taken over the body of a Batman movie. About halfway through, one of these archetypal detectors was bolted after his perpetual demon, a chase that leads by a treacherous escape to a warehouse space, where the policeman is directly at … a carriage like the one that brought Harker to the Earl. . The best attractions make unexpected turns on the way to the next drop.