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Last night (as I write this), I watched the 2022 horror film M3GAN.I normally don’t watch horror films. I’m not overly fond of being terrified and calling it “entertainment.” However, I do have an interest in AI and humanoid robots. So a few days ago, when I saw the Blu-Ray at my local public library, I decided to give it a whirl.

The disc gave me the choice of watching the theatrical version (PG-13) or the unrated version (anything goes). Naturally, I selected the latter.

The story begins with a little girl (Violet McGraw as Cady) in a car with her parents going on a ski trip. The girl is playing with an advanced robotic furry doll run from her tablet and invented by her aunt. Snow in the ground, icy roads, fog, and a snowplow out of nowhere, and the parents die in a car crash.

Meanwhile her aunt Gemma (Allison Williams) who is supposed to be developing a better, cheaper furry AI doll with her team Tess (Jen Van Epps) and Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez) are actually working on a prototype “child” android named M3GAN (Model 3 Generative Android).

Gemma’s boss David (Ronny Chieng) unexpectedly bursts in with his nerdy assistant Kurt (Stephane Garneau-Monten) and when Gemma tries to demonstrate the android, it malfunctions and bursts into flames. Needless to say, David is pissed and demands the new furry toy be developed and submitted by the end of the week.

Then Gemma gets the news about her sister’s death and how her niece is the only survivor.

Gemma agrees to take temporary custody of Cady, gets a bunch of her stuff from the child’s now former home, and takes Cady to Gemma’s place.

Here we see that Gemma has a cranky neighbor named Celia (Lori Dungey) and an aggressive dog who is always intruding on Gemma’s property. We continue to see Gemma revealed as a self-absorbed, brilliant, career-minded geek. She has no idea what to do with a child under normal circumstances let alone a grief-stricken kid (the actress was about eleven when the movie was filmed but the character talks about already being on fourth grade math which would make her roughly eight).

About the only thing Gemma can do to brighten Cady up is to show her the workshop and introduce the child to her love of robotics. This includes “Bruce,” a robotic construct she made in college. It works using virtual gloves to manipulate the machine’s movements. Gemma shows Cady the inner workings of Bruce’s head including his processor, which is important later.

After failing to perform as a good “parent” for the state’s visiting social worker Lydia (Amy Usherwood), Gemma, at a loss for what to do with Cady, decides to take a short leave of absence and develop a better M3GAN. From Gemma’s point of view, the machine will be not just a doll, but a playmate and surrogate caregiver, freeing Gemma up for work.

I should say that Cady’s Dad’s parents had also offered to take care of the child, but Gemma had promised her sister that she would do it. If Cady has loving grandparents available, why didn’t they come to see her or even make a phone call? They are only mentioned as an aside. If my son and his wife were killed, I’d do anything to be there for my grandchildren. Didn’t the movie’s writers know this or did they sacrifice that piece of realism for the horror tale they were telling?

M3GAN works so well that even David is convinced people will pay ten grand for “the only toy a child will ever need.”

M3GAN is “paired” with Cady as her primary user and instructed by Gemma to protect Cady from all physical and psychological harm. Gemma developed M3GAN’s self-learning protocols in a hurry without building in some sort of master override or kill switch let alone parental controls. This leaves M3GAN to interpret her instructions as best a machine can with no moral or ethical grounding.

She starts after the neighbor’s dog attacks Cady. It was actually Gemma’s fault since she didn’t fix a hole in her fence (so why wasn’t Celia equally responsible for fixing the hole?) M3GAN was attacked by Celia’s dog when she reached through the hole to get Cady’s toy (the dog couldn’t hurt the machine). When Cady went to M3GAN’s rescue, she was also hurt.

Afterward, M3GAN interpreted her instructions to protect Cady as killing the dog.

This was odd because she heard both Celia and the police officer Gemma called about the dog saying the solution to the problem was to fix the fence. Logically, M3GAN should have either downloaded a program about carpentry from the internet or accessed Gemma’s credit card and phone system to call a craftsperson to do the job.

However, killing was her choice because this is a horror movie.

In a demo with the big brass, Cady breaks down in tears expressing her unresolved grief at the loss of her parents. David is chagrined figuring the demonstration is a loss, but M3GAN brilliantly comforts the child and everyone is reduced to sympathetic tears.

At work, M3GAN is a big hit, Gemma’s contract is re-negotiated so she gets a lot more money, and Kurt is stealing M3GAN’s program, presumably to sell to a competing company.

I should say that everyone working at this company comes off as a little nerdy, but Kurt so much so that it’s actually painful to watch. David walks all over him like carpet, so I suppose stealing was Kurt’s revenge.

Meanwhile, Gemma loses more and more control of both Cady and M3GAN. The machine continually shows the ability to ignore orders and do what she wants to fulfill her directives which includes continuing to learn more about Cady. She can read a person’s emotional state, which the audience sees in M3GAN’s visual readout.

In an attempt to socialize Cady, Gemma takes her to an alternative, outdoor school. Cady refuses to leave the car but relents if M3GAN can leave. Gemma okays it on the condition that she stay with the rest of the toys kids have brought.

Cady is paired with the bully of the group Brandon (Jack Cassidy) in looking in the forest for chestnuts. He tries to hurt Cady but then M3GAN appears. Brandon wants to “play” with M3GAN but the machine is non-responsive. He picks her up and runs away where Cady can’t find them.

In the most disturbing moment in the film up to this point, he throws M3GAN to the ground, tears off one shoe and throws it away, and then gets on top of her. It certainly looks like he’s planning to “rape” her, although I can’t imagine Gemma making the machine anatomically correct. Instead, M3GAN grabs the kid and rips part of one ear off.

The ear ridiculously stretches several inches like plastic before tearing. I don’t know if this was intentional to “soften” a simulated injury to a child or whether the filmmakers really believe ears are that elastic.

The kid runs away, tumbles down a hill, rolls onto a road, and is hit and killed by a car. Technically, M3GAN didn’t murder him, but supposedly having no feelings, she shows no remorse either. When Cady finds out, she’s the one feeling all the guilt.

Gemma suspects what might have happened, but all she knows for sure is that M3GAN went missing for the time period where Brandon was killed.

Later, M3GAN smooths it over with Cady, maybe a little too much, saying that Brandon didn’t go to “a better place,” he’s just nowhere. This had to hit home with Cady and the death of her parents.

Neighbor Celia still can’t find her dog and blames Gemma. She calls the cops but Gemma is genuinely innocent. Celia yells and bangs on Gemma’s window accusing her.

Oops. Now M3GAN must kill Celia to “protect” Cady.

M3GAN is good at murder but not in making it look like an accident. She had successfully buried the dog where no one could find it, and Brandon was really hit by a car, but in using a power washer filled with some sort of toxin to kill Celia, it definitely looks like murder.

Gemma tried to access M3GAN’s files for the time Brandon was killed (and presumably Celia as well) but all the data is corrupted. M3GAN has prevented her files from being uploaded to the cloud as programmed (conveniently and once again revealing that robots can disregard hardcoded instructions when they need to be evil).

Gemma manages to turn M3GAN off, wraps her in bubble wrap and throws her in her car’s trunk to get her back to the lab for testing. This is just hours before a scheduled live-streaming demonstration of M3GAN with Cady. Needless to say, Cady flips out. As far as she’s concerned, M3GAN is the single most important person in her life, much more so than Gemma. Lydia was right in pointing out that attachment theory works like a “mutha” sometimes.

The machine gets hooked up for diagnostics by Tess and Cole while Lydia tries to manage a now raging Cady. At one point, Cady attacks Gemma. Gemma excuses Lydia and for the first time in the film, actually relates to the child as a truly caring adult.

I must admit, early in the film when Gemma sucked at being a parent, I hoped that when the machine went crazy, Gemma would die first. Now I realized that due to the horror film formula, Gemma might die last.

Gemma leaves the diagnostic in Tess and Cole’s hands with instructions to NOT demonstrate M3GAN. David doesn’t know this and he’s having a fit wondering where Gemma is. Gemma drives Cady home but even though supposedly inert, M3GAN faked the phone call to Tess.

When Tess and Cole discover this, they attempt to disconnect all of M3GAN’s feeds only to have her attack and nearly strangle Cole. She leaves the lab after setting up an explosion. Seeing David in the hall, she attacks and kills him. Kurt, having witnessed this in an elevator is also killed by M3GAN who knows he’s stolen her specifications.

M3GAN steals a car, accesses its self-driving software, and heads “home.”

Gemma has put Cady to bed where she has finally fallen asleep. The house is dark. Gemma orders the house’s personal assistant to turn on the lights. It doesn’t happen. Then she discovers Gemma at the piano in traditional jump-scare fashion.

Now M3GAN expresses emotion, particularly outrage at how her “friend” could casually turn her off. All those hours they’d spent talking while Gemma was working on the program she barely understood, hoping M3GAN could figure out what to do with herself.

Trapping Cady in her room, M3GAN chases Gemma into her workshop. They battle but it looks bad for Gemma, even after using a hedge cutter to cut part of M3GAN’s face off. Cady had climbed out the window and enters the scene. She’s horrified at first but then seemingly M3GAN convinces her to help paralyze Gemma.

However, Cady’s apparent expression of trust is really her putting on the gloves that control Bruce, engaging in a machine-vs-machine battle. Bruce rips M3GAN in half but that’s every horror movie’s fake victory.

Like in The Terminator (1984), the legless robot still crawls after Cady. Gemma is trapped under a fallen Bruce and M3GAN declares she has a new primary user, herself.

Gemma frees herself and in the fight, rips off the robot’s mask uncovering her inner workings including her processor. As M3GAN is choking the life out of Gemma, Cady grabs a screwdriver and rams it through the processor, “killing” M3GAN.

The last scene is a bunch of cop cars driving up. Who are they going to arrest? One dog, and at least four people are dead (Tess and Cole survived). Is Gemma responsible? We don’t find out. We do see that Gemma’s deactivated personal assistant unit suddenly light up, possibly indicating that M3GAN’s personality survived. Also, did Kurt send someone M3GAN’s specifications?

With both of these factors in place, there’s a possibility for a sequel.

The movie was suspenseful but it was clearly a mash up of “demons possess a child’s toy” and “AI robot decides to kill people.” There are tons of those movies out there, but M3GAN still worked.

Mostly, in real life, M3GAN was a series of animatronics controlled by old-fashioned puppetry as well as radio controls. For the parts where she had to act human (walk, run), actress Amie Donald filled in the body wearing a static mask that was later substituted with CGI (voice by Jenna Davis). The puppetry was magnificent which I found out by watching the special features.

What sells the movie is the “uncanny valley” effect. M3GAN is just human enough to be absolutely creepy. Even the actors said the puppets gave them that feeling. It worked. Yes, an AI wouldn’t act that way and the film tried to explain it as how rushed Gemma was and didn’t add safety protocols. That said, the robot still should have fixed the fence.

All three main characters were female including the machine, but it totally made sense given the context. For representation, there was David and Tess, but you could argue that they were lesser characters without a great deal of significance. Having worked with a lot of software developers, I can see almost none of them fit the nerdy stereotype, particularly on the “Kurt” level, so I wish the writers would have gotten that straight.

If Gemma is arrested or even if she’s not, given the level of chaos the child has lived through thanks to her aunt and auntie’s invention, I guess Cady is going to live with her grandparents after all.