In Review: 'M3GAN,' 'White Noise'

In this week's reviews, two movies sound the alarm over changing times.

When “motion-smoothing” is still turned on.

M3GAN
Dir. Gerard Johnstone
102 min.

As clips from M3GAN have circulated online in the lead-up to its release, the film was beginning to feel like another Snakes on a Plane phenomenon, a pre-fab cult classic that, in reality, is mediocre schlock, unworthy of the place it held in the public imagination. A sinister robot companion with American Girl doll primness, Ex Machina-level dance moves, and resting kill face? The memes have already been unleashed. 

But something unexpected has happened, nearly unprecedented for a studio release in the first week of January: The film is good. It could have coasted on the conceit, rattled off a few smug jokes, and left it at that. Yet director Gerard Johnstone, working from a script by Malignant writer Akela Cooper (with a co-story credit to Malignant director James Wan), has delivered the trashy genre goods with humor and panache while poking thoughtfully at themes about modern parenthood and child development, and what happens when technology evolves without moral guardrails. What can we expect when we pair ourselves with devices that grow beyond us? In a film like Her, it’s heartbreak. Here, it’s bone-break.

Set in a future near enough to look exactly like the present, M3GAN stars an ideally cast Allison Williams as Gemma, a roboticist who works on sophisticated toys for children, but doesn’t have much of a connection to them. That changes quickly when her sister and brother-in-law die in a car accident and she suddenly gains custody of her orphaned niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), which would be a tough situation for her even if Cady wasn’t dealing with the trauma of losing her parents. With work deadlines keeping her away from home, Gemma not only dramatically increases Cady’s “screen time,” but does one better, advancing the secret prototype for a doll of unparalleled sophistication to serve as her companion. 

When her boss (a terrific Ronny Chieng) catches wind of the project and dollar signs spring from his eyes, M3GAN (short for Model 3 Generative Android) gets put on the fast track, bolstered by Cady’s encouraging response to the doll. But Gemma and her team haven’t thought-through the negative consequences of an artificial being that has a directive to bond with its primary user, but no limits on how such a bond might manifest, especially in the face of perceived threats. There’s nothing to stop this machine learner from lying or killing or generally developing a sense of itself as an autonomous being that doesn’t have to do what it's told. In that last respect, it’s a cracked mirror reflection of its creator. 

From the delightfully plausible opening commercial, which pushes a line of app-driven robot pets that seem like they could come out tomorrow, M3GAN leans on the comedy part of its horror-comedy mix, with a tip of the hat to Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop among other influences. The doll is a deadpan natural, the smartest being in any room and as coldly calculating as you’d expect from the next generation of  technology—her sentience alone is unnerving, which effectively lays the groundwork for zingers. Johnstone and Cooper have a great time playing up her irreverent nastiness, and they’re generous to other members of the cast, too, including a gum-smacking cop (Millen Baird) who makes a mordant joke about a kid’s missing ear and then disappears from the movie entirely. 

Though M3GAN doesn’t have the satiric agenda of a Verhoeven film, it’s smart about squaring up to the big ideas that its premise suggests, like “screen time” as a form of surrogate parenthood and how our intimacy with “smart” technology can seed its weaponization. The film seems keenly aware of its predecessors—Robocop, yes, but also Westworld, Child’s Play, A.I., and 2001: A Space Odyssey—and has adapted itself to the times as smoothly as a software update. Welcome to January Schlock 2.0, new and improved. — Scott Tobias

M3GAN opens at theaters everyone tomorrow.

White Noise
Dir. Noah Baumbach
136 min.

It’s fitting that there’s scarcely a moment of silence in White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s landmark 1985 novel. From the sound of a film projector that opens the film to the snippets of dialogue between parents and the new arrivals they’re dropping off at the Midwest university called College-on-the-Hill, to the rolling of shopping cart wheels on linoleum to TV chatter to sirens that signal a disaster that may turn out to be no big deal after all, the characters of White Noise live surrounded by so much information, it’s hard to keep track of what matters. 

For Jack Gadney (Adam Driver), a professor in the self-created field of “Hitler Studies,” life at College-on-the-Hill, it’s mostly a matter of amusement, subjects to be studied from a comfortable perch. Jack lives with his vibrant, crimped-haired wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and their four children in a buzzing house. The A&P has everything they need (and keeps getting better all the time). Nothing, it seems, can touch him. Even when a freak accident sends a feathery plume (or is it a black billowing cloud?) headed in his family’s direction, Jack’s sure it will work out all right, never mind the data that his more sensible son Heinrich (Sam Nivola) shares that suggests otherwise. Never mind the drugs his daughter Denise (Raffey Cassidy) has seen Babette secretly taking. Never mind the past, either: Though steeped in the history of fascism, Jack knows he’s living in an America that’s put all disasters in its past, at least until one arrives at his doorstep.

A bold mix of black comedy, academic satire, and apocalyptic dread built around exchanges of precisely crafted dialogues about death, America, God, and other matters, DeLillo’s novel was never going to be easy to adapt. Working in a mode largely removed from his other films, Baumbach’s faithful attempt frequently groans under the difficulty. Seemingly every moment that works, like a bravura set piece in which Jack and fellow professor Murray Suskind (Don Cheadle) deliver intertwined lectures on Hitler and Elvis, is matched by ones that don’t, particularly in the film’s final act. 

But the moments that do work are quite extraordinary, especially the alternately comic and chilling evacuation sequence necessitated by the “airborne toxic event.” Just as importantly, it all unfolds in a perfectly realized dark cartoon of mid-’80s America where the stores explode with exciting new products like Pudding Pockets and, for some at least, even death seemed like it could be kept at bay. On the other side of a different kind of airborne toxic event that brought the world to a halt, Baumbach’s White Noise looks both quaint and current, a vision of what was, what still is, and what may be again. —Keith Phipps

White Noise is now playing on Netflix.