Malicious, the new horror movie from writer/director Michael Winnick, is Insidious shot like The Conjuring. It’s not a James Wan imitation as that sentence suggests, but it takes the premise of Insidious – that it’s a person who’s haunted, not a house – but photographed in long, slow takes across shadowy hallways and creepy rooms. The movie has the look and feel of an old-fashioned gothic ghost story, but the ghosts are angry and aggressive like they are in Insidious. Delroy Lindo even shows up in the Lin Shaye role as a clairvoyant who is brought in to explain the problem. The movie isn’t as disciplined and elegant as The Conjuring, nor is it as crazy and fun as Insidious, but it’s not for lack of trying.
Josh Stewart (best known to horror fans for The Collector and The Collection) stars as Adam, a math professor who takes a new job at a college and moves into a new house with his pregnant wife Lisa (Bojana Novakovic). They receive a gift from Lisa’s sister Becky (Melissa Bolona): a box that apparently can’t be opened. One day, though, Lisa gets it open but discovers nothing inside. The very same day, she begins seeing and experiencing things she can’t explain, suffering a miscarriage in the process. As the couple grieves their loss, things get weirder and creepier until they must consult a paranormal specialist (Lindo) to understand the nature of the evil they’re facing.
While ghost stories are often among the scariest horror movies – it’s the terror of your own home and every noise and bump you here within it – they also require the greatest amount of patience. The formula is almost always the same: they start small with something moved or out of place and very, very slowly escalate until the last 15 minutes or so, when Shit Actually Happens. Malicious doesn’t stray far from this formula, taking its time to finally let it rip and offer up a couple of big moments. When they come, they’re darker and more twisted than anything that has before them, making me wish that Winnick had put more trust into this aspect of the film. The willingness to cross the line is where Malicious begins to distinguish itself from other movies of the genre, but there’s too little of it and it happens too late.
While I appreciate Winnicks’ willingness to show and not only tell – not every movie has to be The Haunting – the lack of budget makes for some dodgy visual effects. That would be ok if they weren’t so necessary for the scares to work. After all, it’s hard to feel the jolt we’re supposed to feel at the sight of a demon baby if all we’re reacting to is the shoddiness of the effect. There’s a difficult double-edged sword a movie like Malicious has to wield: as a filmmaker, you don’t want to rely solely on the power of suggestion, but you also have to know when to pull it back when you don’t have the resources to achieve the exact vision of a Big Scare moment. To its credit, the movie tries to do both. When it’s embracing the physical, tangible sorts of scares, it works.
The rest of the movie, however, can best be described as “clunky.” The performances are incredibly uneven, with Josh Stewart never departing from his disaffected cool-guy monotone no matter how crazy things get. The occasional appearance of Delroy Lindo only puts the movie’s performance problem into sharper relief, as he’s so natural and effortlessly good on screen that it calls attention to where some of the other actors fall short. Winnick’s screenplay is thuddingly obvious at times, too. An early conversation about math and how every problem has a single, logical solution feels heavy-handed the first time; by the 15th or 20th time it’s invoked, it’s almost unintentionally funny. The script just leans so hard on this single character trait that it sucks up all the leftover oxygen in the dialogue.
Like almost every film I’ve seen during Cinepocalypse this year, Malicious means well. That’s important, because sincerity goes a long way for me when it comes to horror. The movie is attempting to confront some very real anxieties about marriage and parenting through a supernatural lens, and while it’s rarely successful, there is honor in the effort. Why then Winnick chooses to end on such a mean-spirited and out of place beat is beyond me when what has come before has tried to be emotionally honest, but I guess that’s in keeping with the rest of Malicious. For every one thing that works, there are three that don’t.
