Like any self-respecting homosexual, I was hooked on M3gan from the moment I saw the trailer drop. Or, well, more accurately, the moment I saw Twitter-user @Pat_Merc’s fancam of M3gan’s dance set to Toddrick Hall’s “Nails Hair Hips Heels.]

M3gan is the latest entry in a long lineage of what I’m going to call “evil little murder doll movies” — you know the ones. Chucky, Slappy, Annabelle and so forth. Dolls are a little bit inherently creepy; Linda Rodriguez McRobbie writes that dolls “inhabit this area of uncertainty largely because they look human but we know they are not.” M3gan’s creepiness is dialed up by 10, given she’s approximately the size of a human child and, of course, powered by a fictionally-superpowered AI that enables her to learn and adapt maybe even beyond the capabilities of her human creator. Sort of like if your Replika was uploaded into an American Girl (TM) doll and also did absolutely commit murder. And was dressed impeccably.

Art by Aliza Layne, used with permission of the artist. (Thanks aliza!!)

What works the best in M3gan is the levity director Gerard Johnstone brings to his subject. I’m not great at judging scary—I jump when my partner opens a door—but I appreciate a horror film that isn’t afraid to be funny about it. I’ve heard the word “campy” banded about too, but I think M3gan the film is not campy so much as M3gan the doll is. Seriously, I’m fascinated by M3gan’s design—girl’s walking around in the custom Louis Vuitton fur jacket while Cady, the actual human child, spends most of the movie in the same pajamas. (This is a fantastic decision, by the way.)

Though the film doesn’t take itself too seriously, the more time I’ve spent with it the more I’m interested in what M3gan says not about technology but about capitalism. Johnstone described M3gan as “an analogy about parenting in the age of iPads,” and it’s about as subtle in that regard as having your about-to-die parent characters arguing about iPad screen time approximately 45 seconds before they die. At the same time, I never felt like Johnstone was hitting me over the head with some sort of anti-tech morality lesson. If anything, what I saw was a story about technology as a bandaid solution for ongoing alienation caused by late-stage capitalism.

Gemma (Allison Williams), M3gan’s creator, seems to have no genuine connection to the people around her. The closest thing to friends she seems to have are her coworkers. Her roommate is a custom Alexa named Elsie. And to be clear, none of this is a dig at Gemma as a character! I love that bitch! She sucks! She sucks so bad she has to make an AI capable of feeling love—albeit, obsessive, dangerous, overprotective love—to take care of her niece, who just lost both of her parents. She also sucks because she designed a toy that has small dentures instead of a mouth. We meet her arguing with her neighbor over her neighbor’s pesticides leaking into her yard, and her neighbor’s dog breaking through a hole in the fence Gemma just can’t seem bothered to mend. The hole in the fence, juuust big enough for an evil doll to lure a medium-sized dog through, pops up again and again, and each time she doesn’t even deign to respond to the suggestion of fixing it. But there isn’t a technological fix for a broken fence, and Gemma instead blames her neighbor for transgressing on her perceived boundaries. Technology, for Gemma, offers the premise of control, and she’s clearly a bit of a control freak–for example, the recurring focus on her niece Cady failing to use a coaster.

The intrusion of Cady into Gemma’s is exactly that—an inconvenient intrusion. Cady, a child, cannot be controlled and manipulated like a computer program. She’s unpredictable, especially since she’s recovering from the loss of her parents. Gemma makes attempts to connect with her, but seems unable to understand what a child might actually respond to–and again, her entire job is to design toys for children. A job she’s under a lot of pressure at, because the toy she designed, the Perpetual Pet, just got ripped off by a competitor (they’re selling for half the price!) The Perpetual Pet itself is a perfect encapsulation of Furzi, the company Gemma designs for, and Gemma’s own apathy. It’s basically a furby with dentures, in a fun nod to the genre of customized and very cursed furbys (furbies?) currently for sale on Etsy. It speaks and can… poop… and the main way kids play with it is through an iPad app, to bring us back to the iPad kid analogy. The very first thing we see in M3gan is a fake advertisement for the Perpetual Pet, cheerfully explaining that while our real, living pets die, the Perpetual Pet lives forever, solving the pesky problem of mortality. It’s a cheap fix for having to deal with children processing grief, and sets us up nicely for Cady’s own arc as she struggles to cope with the senseless loss of her parents.

Enter M3gan. M3gan, like the Perpetual Pet, represents an unchanging, nonthreatening (oops) way to gain control over the unpredictability of parenting. But M3gan is a prototype, and a rush job, born of Gemma’s desperation but still subject to the whims of investor capital. The narrative is guided by investor demonstrations and deliverable deadlines, with Cady and, in a way, M3gan, exploited to deliver on Funzi’s bottom line. Gemma admits at one point that she didn’t have time to install parental controls on M3gan: as with the Perpetual Pets, M3gan is a means to an end to further her career and to keep Furzi financially ahead of the competitors. And this includes using Cady as a tool for profit, as Cady’s sad story makes for viral marketing. Does Gemma ever come to see Cady as a human and not a tool for her career? Honestly, unclear. The only reason Gemma finally turns against her creation is the pesky little murder issue, and while I guess that counts, I don’t feel like she deserves that much credit.

So, in the rush to provide her deliverables, she lets loose on the world a doll that can sing, dance, and wield a paper slicing blade like a baton. Is M3gan really evil, or is it the condition of the world that made her? (Coming soon: the Dardenne brothers’ M3gan.) In a lot of ways, Gemma and M3gan’s relationship is the classic Frankenstein and his monster. And like Frankenstein’s monster, M3gan’s monstrosity is formed out of the conditions that created her. (And, okay, she does murder a kid, and a bunch of other people, but.) It’d be easy to point to a film like M3gan and say, okay, we get it, iPad Bad, Kids Should Touch Grass. But no one ever reaches that conclusion. Instead, technology, including M3gan, seeps through the cracks in these characters’ relationships, hoping to smooth over the discomfort caused by being a human and existing in a social sphere and replace it with easy, controllable algorithms that do the work for us. It brings to mind the 2017 controversy over Youtube content aimed at kids even more than the current AI-fueled discussions happening now for me.

M3gan takes what could be a pretty hamfisted analogy, and uses it to prod at the edges of our increasing dependence on technology, not as a way to make life better for us but as a way to keep us from putting in the work to make life better. Thankfully, we’re never spoonfed that morality lesson: instead, we’re treated to a group of wonderfully dislikable adults being tormented by a 4 foot doll singing SZA. And that’s cinema, baby!

Final scores:

M3gan’s fussy victorian doll outfits: 10/10

Casting: Brian Jordan Alvarez/10

Murders: PG-13/10

Remus’ Letterboxd Rating: 5/5

Recommended Double Feature: Smart House (1999)

M3gan: That's Cinema, Baby!