Malevolent Review (Film, 2018) #31DaysofHorror

Sometimes, a film makes so many mistakes, it’s actually impressive that it managed to be finished at all. Malevolent is one of the most misguided, unfocused, and just plain poorly planned horror films I’ve encountered in a long time.

Angela has an interesting part time job while studying psychology at university: she’s a pretend medium for hire. Her brother Jackson finds clients claiming they need to get rid of ghosts in their home. The siblings lay on the shtick while friends Elliot and Beth set up cameras, speakers, and other tech for gags simulating a haunting. The client watches on a closed circuit feed while Angela makes contact, asks the ghosts to leave, and cleanses the house. The scam works fine until Angela suddenly develops actual psychic powers.

Angela does not believe that her brother does not believe that she could possibly maybe have the same problems they both witnessed their mother go through.

There’s a premise to a great horror film here. The opening sequence feels like a spin on The Sixth Sense from the perspective of the person who can suddenly see dead people. Then the cracks begin to show and the whole thing falls apart.

The first warning sign is the treatment of mental illness in the film. It’s revealed right after Angela begins actually seeing ghosts that her mother committed herself to a psychiatric hospital for years trying to get rid of the voices in her head, visions of people who were not actually there, and nosebleeds that accompanied said visions. Everyone who discusses her mother refuses to acknowledge mental health problems are real.

She is described not as someone suffering but as a weak person who willingly chose to run away from life when life got hard and abandoned her family. Angela is then made fun of by her brother for being as weak as their mother for the remainder of the film. It’s almost like the real horror of the film is poor Angela and her poor mother having to live with a bunch of men who don’t believe anything they say. Forget about disbelieving in ghosts: this film posits that anyone having issues with mental wellness is an attention seeking weakling making things up for attention.

Speaking of making things up, I’d have a much easier time understanding how Malevolent is a film at all if you told me the whole thing was adapted from an amateur improv group’s first long form performance for an audience. There is so little consistency from scene to scene in what the film wants to be that it loses all purpose and reason. Characters switch motivation on a whim. Their style of speaking changes mid-scene with no real purpose or reveal.

There’s so much that can be done in horror with scam artists getting their comeuppance or a new medium growing beyond a scam to actual success. None of that happens in Malevolent.

If not a long form improv from a group of amateurs, I’d also accept the possibility that maybe the production team accidentally filmed pages from multiple screenplays and didn’t realize until it was too late to afford reshoots for one complete film. Twists can be great when wielded effectively. A mediocre twist doesn’t necessarily sink a whole film. But a film that changes plot over and over and over again, almost scene by scene, is never going to be good if it presents itself as a singular narrative. Malevolent feels like an anthology film that was accidentally shot as a single story.

The opening sequence works well. The switch from Angela being a willing scam artist to Angela actually seeing ghosts is great. It even contains one of the best scares of the entire film: a jump scare that could be explained away as a simple prank against her. From there, we get into diatribes discrediting mental illness, a completely dropped plot thread about Angela struggling in school because of the family business, a severely haunted house story with creepy murdered children, a stern older disciplinarian taking revenge on anyone who cannot help her, a get rich quick to pay off debts mob film, and a series of unhealthy romances thrown in for good measure. None of the ideas are developed enough to make any sense in the context of the opening sequence.

I would say Malevolent is a case of misplaced ambition if I thought any real thought went into it; I don’t. The entire film feels lazy. Every scare that happens, every design choice, every character, and every plot point is recognizable from a far greater film. Cherry-picking a best of compilation of horror’s greatest haunted house hits doesn’t mean you really put a lot of thought into planning a film.

Malevolent is currently streaming on Netflix.

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