Film review: M3GAN chillingly plays to our very worst fears

If you’ve ever thought there was something just a bit odd and slightly sinister about all this “Hey Siri” nonsense on your iPad, then this film is for you. If you can’t quite bring yourself not to say “Hey Siri, thank you” when it answers your question, then here is a film which will play into your very worst nightmares.

Yes, it is silly, but it’s certainly chilling insofar as it’s also a ghastly little look at the world towards which we might just be heading.

M3GAN (unfortunate in the current climate that it carries the name of an outsider who is welcomed in only to disrupt the status quo) is gleefully gruesome and of course utterly, utterly ridiculous. Or is it? Who knows.

Toy-company roboticist Gemma (Get Out’s Allison Williams) is a brilliant visionary who gets lumbered with her orphaned eight-year-old niece Cady (Violet McGraw) when her sister and her brother-in-law are killed in a snowy car crash.

Consequently Cady – the last thing Gemma wants or has ever prepared for – comes to live with her, coincidentally just as she is putting the finishing touches to M3GAN, a Model 3 Generative Android which looks and acts like precisely the new friend grieving Cady needs. The genius in Gemma’s flawed plan is that the longer her girlbot spends with her “primary user” (ie Cady), the more she learns to anticipate her human friend’s needs and wants. It's a nice plan – all the while you can safely and effectively say “M3GAN, turn off” and reduce the creepy, super self-possessed pseudo-creature to glassy-eyed silence. But what happens when M3GAN refuses to power down? And what happens when M3GAN, programmed to protect Cady, starts taking her duties rather too diligently? The annoying dog next door, indeed the annoying neighbour and also the bullying thug at the open-air school… Poor things, they really, really weren’t to know, were they. If you can accept M3GAN’s creation, then you have got to admire the film’s logic as Frankenstein’s creature turns on her Frankenstein. It’s just a little bit late – with M3GAN about to be launched on an unsuspecting world as the must-have addition to your cosy family nest – when Gemma starts to think “Uh oh, maybe this really wasn’t such a good idea after all.” When M3GAN starts to answer back, Gemma finally realises M3GAN really wasn’t the kind of playmate she should have been lining up for her niece. But then again, poor singleton super-brain Gemma was hardly to know that intelligence, artificial or real, is never going to be enough by itself.

Dolls are always disturbing additions to any horror film; M3GAN takes it to the next level. In truth, the film really isn’t as scary as it could have been however nasty the fates meted out to a number of characters. But maybe more effective still is the fact that it is thought-provoking and genuinely disturbing. You can’t ignore the question: is this really so very, very far-fetched? And until we know the answer, I am going to keep saying “Thank you” very nicely to my iPad.