Coupled with the fact that Gabriel’s brainwaves can manipulate electricity and cause Madison to hallucinate, there’s some real next-level shit going on here. The third-act discovery by Madison’s sister, Sydney (Maddie Hasson), that Gabriel is not a supernatural figure, or Madison’s imaginary friend given form, but a parasitic twin that physicians cut down to size and buried in Madison’s skull as a child is absolute insanity. If the setup in which a young woman, Madison Mitchell (Annabelle Wallis), is tormented by a figure named Gabriel with ties to her childhood seemed too easy for someone of Wan’s caliber, that’s because it is.

Wan, regardless of whether he’s working with a budget of $200 million or $1.5 million, has never lacked for ambition. There’s Wan’s camera trickery and Joseph Bishara’s score cluing the audience in that this is indeed a James Wan film, but it initially seems awfully unambitious, as the trailer suggested, for a filmmaker who not only emerged as one of the modern masters of horror with Saw (2004), Insidious (2010), Insidious Chapter 2 (2013), The Conjuring (2013) and The Conjuring 2 (2016), but also delivered two billion-dollar blockbusters with Furious 7 (2015) and Aquaman (2018). The film, conceived by James Wan and Ingrid Bisu, and written by Akela Cooper, begins simply enough with a setup akin to so many supernatural horror films. And then watch it again to be certain you saw what you just saw. If you haven’t seen Malignant yet, you should stop reading this immediately and go watch it. James Wan’s latest, Malignant, feels cut from the same cloth as those aforementioned features, destined to be a neo-cult classic. These are movies that are uniquely and completely made for the enjoyment of their creators, and if the rest of us happen to catch on, well, good for us.

It’s that you can watch them and feel like you’re getting a piece of the filmmaker’s unfiltered consciousness - for better or worse. It’s not that any of these films share commonalities besides their rather dismal box office receipts and polarizing audience response.

I’m talking about films like Southland Tales (2006), Grindhouse (2007), Jennifer’s Body (2009), Jupiter Ascending (2015), A Cure for Wellness (2016) and mother! (2017). Every once and a while, a genre film comes along that’s so off-the-wall, so against the grain of the current pop-culture zeitgeist, and so wholly the work of a filmmaker’s id and formative instincts that it’s difficult to believe any major studio would give it the green light.

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