FROM THE ORIGINAL CINEMASTERS ARCHIVE
It feels a little heavy handed to call this flick an audible. The truth is, it just wasn’t on my list. One of the things about many of the streaming platforms is their layout is not conducive to prolonged searching. It seems as though what they like to do is try and get you into a comfortable program as quickly as possible so their timers get started so they’re tracking your viewing. I don’t mean to make them out to be this Pentaverate bent on global domination. But just think about it next time you’re jumping into a streaming service blind with nothing in mind to watch. They push the new stuff and the trending stuff in your face first. I think that satisfies a lot of folks. Now, this isn’t the people who log in to watch Friends or The Office. Those people already picked their white noise. They want to scroll instagram and listen to an episode of something they’ve seen 100 times before. I’m truly talking about people who have a blank slate on their mind. Not even the notion of wanting to watch a true crime or a slapstick comedy. When you start really scrolling or even trying to cultivate an idea for what you want to watch, you start realizing pretty quickly that it almost feels like they’re hiding something from you. I have the Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle. What this does not afford me is the clunky interface with Hulu anymore. And I miss it. I hated navigating Hulu as it’s own app. Being assimilated into Disney+ has not made it any more user friendly. I use to be able to go on this little adventure and tumble backwards into caverns of undiscovered areas of their catalog. I’d find treasure troves of movies I had no idea where tucked away because they weren’t on the landing page. That’s the modus operandi. Hit the landing page and get you into a program quickly. It’s like streaming services are one big used car lot. But if you want to sift through it all a bit and try and find something, it’s like they’ve intentionally made it difficult for you. Sure, if you know exactly what you want you can hit that search page just as quickly and be in your program in a jiffy. But today I went in blind, at least mostly. I wanted a horror movie obviously. But you can’t just see everything in the horror section. This is where I applaud services like MAX or Paramount+ or even Peacock. You can go to that tab and just peruse their entire catalog in one place from A – Z. It’s perfect for making a list like mine or just seeing the whole spectrum of what is available. But that’s not how Netflix does it. So I had to look around a bit until I found something that appealed to me. Well, appealed might be a little strong. I came across Malevolent and decided to forgo a longer search for something else when I felt like this one would suffice.
To be honest, I thought this movie was a lot newer than 2018 when I put it on. I know it says the year on the page where you hit play but I think I just happened to miss that piece. Actually, come to think of it, I don’t even think I realized Florence Pugh was in the film until I saw her on screen. It was a pleasant surprise. I didn’t bother with much on the plot either. I knew the basic set up was some young ghost scammers make money bilking folks for their cash by faux exorcising a ghost that was never really there. Theatrics and gadgets do most of the heavy lifting. All this comes to an abrupt halt when Scooby and the gang get a call about a REAL ghost. One of the things that does get to be kind of tough with this whole Halloween adventure I take is the challenge of going through “new” horror movies. Not necessarily recent. Just ones I’ve not seen before. I don’t typically have a lot to go off of when I’m picking them. I try and bring in flicks that I’ve had in mind before or even ones from childhood that I never got around to seeing. But the reality is that having seen so many horror movies in my adult years, it’s really hard to find something that’s any kind of original. And I know I could hunt down some of the artsy stuff or foreign stuff but a lot of that is either really weird and unenjoyable or ultra gory, which is not my thing. I don’t have super high expectations for horror movies so I feel like I’m not hard to please but at the same time, it can get to be a little arduous sometimes when trying to walk that line of offering grace to a film that’s mediocre while still trying to have a standard to hold these movies to in the end.
I think this movie walks that line ok. I’m not going to rave about this movie but I’m not going to rip it apart either. Florence Pugh is really the glue in this film. It’s a good, quality production. I’m pretty sure it’s a Netflix endeavor and they are usually pretty good about the quality of film they produce visually, at least. Going back 6 years in Pugh’s career you can see that she was always going to be something special when it comes to the big screen. I’m not entirely sure when Florence really crossed over into a more household name like she has become today, but I feel like she wasn’t really on my radar in 2018. Ok so I had to go look just to get some perspective. She hit the scene initially in 2014. I think the first time I really saw her was in 2019 which seems to be when she started building steam in her career. I know I saw the Liam Neeson flick “The Commuter” but it was a pretty forgettable movie and I certainly don’t have recollection of a spectacular Florence Pugh performance. So I have to say my earliest experience with her was in “Fighting with My Family” in 2019. Having now seen this movie, I can see why she was on the rise. In a relatively white noise, streaming produced horror movie, she’s certainly the most relevant party involved. Her performance isn’t Oscar worthy, per se, but she certainly does shine brighter than anyone else in the film. But any way you slice it, she’s definitely the positive in this movie.
If I had to saddle this movie with a negative it would be that it’s just unoriginal. Ghost movies are hard to really shine up in a new kind of way. They’ve been played out so many times that no matter how you go about putting your movie together, it’s always going to feel at least a little tired. This movie is certainly no different. They don’t have a particular angle that differentiates this story. There’s nothing overtly unique about a narrative. There’s definitely not a strong allegory to a human condition trying to be expressed. The film simply exists. While I can admit there were a couple of times where they did something strategically horror related that worked out, most of the time anything that would be creepy was just sort of meh. In the right way, tortured souls of children stuck in a ghostly afterlife can be a hauntingly good time. But this is pretty middle of the road. I can’t even really point back to the point in the narrative where they even tried to explain to me how everything came together. I think there was something about the girls being loud or obnoxious so they had to have their mouths sewn shut. It’s just that extreme punishment when examined after the fact makes the punisher clearly appear insane for inflicting said consequence. I feel like at one point they may have been hinting at a cat and mouse sort of play where the woman responsible for contracting these young paranormal investigators was a part of some kind of twisted scheme to lure them there. But if that was the case, it didn’t come across strong enough for me to notice despite mostly paying attention. Actually that would have added a much more sinister element. It still wouldn’t have made it terribly unique. But if the team had truly been contacted and contracted under false pretenses so they could be picked off one by one, that would have made for a slightly more engaging plot. I think the bones of a story are still somewhere inside this movie, just not in the one we got to watch.
In the end I think I’m giving this movie a C. There was a part of me that almost tipped it down to a C- but I’m not going to hold it against this movie that it’s relatively unoriginal and a little bland. It still hits well enough in the necessary elements to make it a reasonably enjoyable ghost story. There’s definitely much better spooks and specters on film out there. But there’s also much worse too. I’m looking at you “Ghost Dad”. So this movie just sort of sails right down the middle with the most noble of mediocrity. There’s nothing overtly detracting from the film but also nothing terribly inspirational either. It simply exists as a movie you can watch. I won’t stand by anything particularly scary in the film either. But overall I’m not upset that I watched the film. It mostly held my attention for the run time. I didn’t find it to be outstandingly bad or good. It just was. It’s a pretty cookie cutter, white noise kind of horror flick for this Halloween season. So I wouldn’t advise throwing this on for your nightly fright or recommending it on movie night with the gang. If you’re in that classic daytime laundry mode and need something eerie for the season on while you fold, this one won’t make you invest much emotionally. That about does it for Malevolent. So until next time, I’ll catch you on the flip side.