Three Movies Made January A Great Month For Horror

Ken Jones, OnScreen Blog Chief Film Critic

January, typically speaking, is a bad month for movies. Traditionally, it has been the month where studios dump their bad movies. You will have some Oscar contenders that got a limited release in December get a wide release in January, but the newest releases in January are often the scraps. Sometimes they were films studios thought could be positioned in the fall as Oscar contenders, but they test poorly or receive poor reviews at fall film festivals, Monuments Men comes immediately to mind for me. Others are just dumped because there is no place for the studio to put it in their release calendar where it will be profitable. January 2023, though, bucked the trend, at least in the horror genre, as it featured three unique horror movies that provided a variety of subgenre options for fans to enjoy or at least sample.

M3GAN

The month opened with M3GAN, a Blumhouse feature about a life-sized artificial intelligence doll that becomes sentient and eventually wreaks havoc in the lives of its inventor, Gemma, portrayed by Ashley Williams, and her recently orphaned niece, Cady, who comes to live with her, portrayed by young Violet McGraw (her older sister, Madeline, coincidentally, was in 2021’s The Black Phone).

M3GAN is a horror film in the vein of Child’s Play and several other tales about possessed dolls or inanimate objects. It really leans into the camp right from the beginning, with an outrageous commercial for a high-tech toy pet from a company named Funki. The boss is comically aloof. The programmers cut corners to make M3GAN ready in time for a big launch. There’s a giant Chekovian device that pops up in the first act that is telegraphed from a mile away, but still works when it comes back around in the third act.

Cady’s increasing dependent and unhealthy relationship with M3GAN is a commentary on our collective overreliance on technology and how easy it is to throw a screen in front of a child to get them to be quiet. Technology is entwined more and more seamlessly with the average home with each passing year, so it’s not hard to envision a doll like M3GAN or AI like Samantha in Her or an android like Yang in After Yang being just over the technological horizon.

M3GAN was written by the same screenwriter who wrote 2021’s Malignant, Akelah Cooper. I thought it was a definite step forward from that movie. And it has been successful enough that a sequel is already in the works for 2025, and who knows what the AI landscape will look like by then.

Rating: 3.5 out 5 stars

 Skinamarink

Skinamarink, a wholly unique film experience got a wide release after it ran at several film festivals over the summer and accidentally got leaked online, creating the word-of-mouth campaign that miraculously pushed it to 800+ North American screens in the middle of January.

Filmed on a budget of a mere $15,000, Skinamarink is about as arthouse and experimental a horror film as you can get. Though shot digitally, the graininess of the picture lends itself to looking like it was filmed entirely on a camcorder from the mid-90s, when the film is set. Two children wake up in the middle of the night to find that their parents are gone, the doors and windows have disappeared, and there is a monster or entity of some kind in the house with them.

What makes the film experimental is that everything takes places either partly or completely off camera. Of the two kids who are the main characters in the movie, you only see their faces once each and even then, they are obscured. The voice of the entity in the building with them almost always sounds like it is coming from down the hallway or from another room. A scene with a parent sitting on the edge of the bed only shows them from their chest down, from the perspective of one of the children.

To the film’s credit, it does have moments where the disembodied voice speaking to the children or the parent sitting on the edge of the bed telling their child to look underneath the bed creates a sense of dread and unease, but the entire film is geared around creating this atmosphere and long periods of the camera being focused on old cartoons playing on the TV or Legos on the living room floor. All of it is inspired by director Kyle Edward Ball’s recollection of nightmares he had as a kid, and it does in fact comes across as an artistic attempt to bring to life the nightmare of a 6-year-old.

Personally, though, I thought the film was a concept that would have made for a great short film that lost its effectiveness when stretched out to 100 minutes. It also definitely feels like a film concept that someone decided to make while pent up during the Covid pandemic.

While I didn’t personally go for it, I was nonetheless happy to see a weird movie like Skinamarink get a wide release. I was one of three people in the theater when I went to see it, and the other two walked out with about 30 minutes left. I have seen reports of several walkouts from other showings across the country, no doubt because the people purchasing their tickets had no clue what they were walking into. I had an inkling, but even I found it to be a chore. Having said that, I’m all for more movies like Skinamarink getting made and hopefully finding an audience. I’m bound to like a handful of them. More weird movies!!!

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

 Infinity Pool

Speaking of weird, Brandon Cronenberg continues to take his father’s legacy of body horror in his own unique directions with the release of Infinity Pool, adding it to the growing and impressive list of titles in his early filmography.

This film is set at a beach resort in a fictional country, a place that looks Mediterranean. As with many destination resorts in exotic places, it is in a beautiful locale, but surrounded by poverty, and visitors are discouraged from leaving the grounds of the resort and venturing into the nearby villages, where crime is supposedly rampant. Alexander Skarsgård’s James is a fledgling novelist who wrote a book a few years back that flopped critically, and he goes with his wife to this resort hoping for inspiration. He finds a whole lot more than inspiration, hitting it off with a couple, but mainly Mia Goth’s Gabi, who claims to be a fan of his.

When the four of them venture out beyond the walls of the resort for an excursion, the results are disastrous and they run afoul of the law there and the penalty is death or for people willing to pay, they can watch a clone of themselves be executed in their place. When James witnesses this, it unlocks something in him.

I have not seen Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral, but his 2020 film, Possessor was a mind trip and then some. Infinity Pool is in a similar vein, with James spiraling down a wild path of increased debauchery and violence after gaining a feeling of invincibility of escaping the consequences of his actions. Things obviously take a dark turn, and the questions of identity that can be associated with clones and whatnot inevitably bubble up to the surface. Mia Goth also gives a truly gonzo, bonkers performance. She has really carved out a lane for herself and the types of challenging roles that she is attracted to, really dating back to A Cure For Wellness or even further back. It is just the right kind of crazy that the film demands, that in the hands of the wrong actress could come across as too shrill or unhinged or over the top.

Infinity Pool is disturbed, twisted, and challenging. I’m excited to see what Cronenberg the Younger has in store going forward.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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