Much like its Roman namesake, the month of January has two faces when it comes to the world of cinema, whilst the conversations are all abuzz with awards shows and accolades the actual theatrical releases tend to be a little lacklustre, especially in horror, but Master of the genre James Wan is here to break that tradition with his story, co-written with his Malignant collaborator Akela Cooper, about a 4ft tall doll programmed to be a child’s best friend via a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence.  

Opening with an overtly cheesy and surprisingly comical advert for a generic Furby-esque toy called the Purrpetual Pet, the tone of the film is set quite quickly; a satirical take with a comedic edge. We’re then introduced to nine-year old Cady playing with her own Purrpetual Pet, Leroy, as her family drive up the mountain for a skiing vacation but when a snow plow appears out of nowhere and kills her parents, Cady finds herself under the guardianship of her aunt Gemma, a robotics engineer who actually designed the toy.  

Unfortunately, as is often the way in modern cinema, the career driven high achieving woman is not exactly the mothering type and Gemma and Cady struggle to find any common ground – ignoring the fact that that they are both going through a period of grief. Enter the Model 3 Generative Android, aka M3gan, an experimental prototype that could be the answer to Gemma’s inability to empathise with her grieving niece.  

M3gan’s artificial intellectual learning programme allows her to continuously learn and evolve to be everything that Cady needs be it a teacher, a babysitter or a shoulder to cry on. Despite carrying a $10,000 price tag, Gemma’s boss sees the mass market appeal to those wealthy parents whose time is far too important to spend actually raising their children and pushes Gemma to rush M3gan through Beta testing in time for an accelerated launch date. What could possibly go wrong? 

The story is surprisingly solid, the jump scares are conservative – think Haunting of Hill House rather than The Conjuring – and the violence is pared back, all of which means that this is a great choice both for hard-core horror fans and those of you who, like me, tend to wind up watching at least one part of a horror film from behind your fingers.  

Although some of you may recognise Allison Williams (Gemma) from Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Violet McGraw (Cady) from Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House, the lack of big-name actors actually helped the story as it ensures the focus is on the titular character, brought to screen via an impressive mix of CGI, animatronics and puppetry with the majority of M3gan’s physical movements provided by actress Amie Donald. 

This blend of techniques, coupled with voice work supplied by Jenna Davis, leads to a suitably sinister villain that is both realistic enough to be vaguely plausible in the not-too-distant future yet artificial enough to get the hairs on the back of your neck a-tingling. You know as an audience that it is all going to go tits up but the question is when? And this constant feeling of anticipation, of something always being just around the corner that makes M3gan a better than average horror flick. 

I have to admit that overall, this was actually a pretty good film and with its social commentary on our over-reliance on technology and our reduced capacity to interact with each other on an emotional level, for me, M3gan had the overall feel of a feature length Black Mirror episode. And I, for one, am all for it.