I swear I’mma watch a semi-generic action movie soon. I even have one in mind! If I can just get to a stretch of more than zero movies in a row on the horror podcast that I have actually seen before. Well, it didn’t happen yet though.

Malignant is “split” for the scare and “dumb” for the style. I will say that I understand why people would have called this movie dumb, but it honestly kind of worked? Maybe better if I hadn’t pre-known the genre categories they were aiming for, but if I’m being real, I’d kind of forgotten / zoned it out by the time I actually watched.

To business! See, there’s this pregnant lady and she has had a lot of miscarriages, apparently because her boyfriend is down to just shove her into a wall so hard the back of her head caves in the drywall. But that’s okay, because a shadowy mysterious figure obliterates him later that night. And now Madison and her sister are in a race against time and the ever more suspicious police to figure out who the figure is, why she keeps having visions of his murders, what he has to do with the fact that Madison is adopted and remembers nothing of her childhood before that, and what all of this has to do with the psychiatric hospital in the first prequel scene where things were not really going well for the staff.

Were there dumb character decisions? Unquestionably. Who breaks into an abandoned hospital in the middle of the night to look for old files and just assumes everything will turn out fine? …okay, besides me. I would absolutely do that. But who else? This is not survival behavior! Was some of the plotting dumb? Here I mean plotting around certain emergences and especially certain retractions, about which I should not say more. But the special effects were cool and it did undo a previous massive plot hole.

My point is, I’ll forgive a lot when a movie can keep you guessing for a little while and is also, if not scary, at least pretty horrifying to boot. I’m not sure how I missed this one, to be honest. I think when it came out I mentally classified it as part of the Conjuring cinematic universe and then completely tuned it out. I now deem this to have been a mistake, but 5 years late is better than usual, to be honest? Still, I hope they do not make a sequel. It’s a complete story! Let it be, y’all.