MALIGNANT (2013)

Studio:       Gravita Ventures
Director:    Brian Avenet-Bradley
Writer:       Brian Avenet-Bradley
Producer:  Laurence Avenet-Bradley
Stars:     Gary Cairns, Brad Dourif, Nick Nicotera, Sienna Farall, Steve Wastell, Jennifer Blanc

Review Score:

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Summary:

An alcoholic becomes the unwitting test subject in a mysterious scientist’s unusual experiment to cure the man’s addiction.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Seven months after the death of his wife, alcoholic Allex continues to cope through excessive drinking. While at a bar, Allex receives an anonymous text telling him to stop. Allex continues drinking anyway before going home to drink more.

While drunk at home, Allex meets a mysterious stranger who claims that he wants to help Allex stop drinking. Allex blacks out. He wakes the next morning to find a freshly stitched scar on his chest. Allex goes to St. Laurence Hospital and is told that computer records indicate he was stitched after a bar fight, although Allex believes the report is falsified.

Allex goes on another bender and blacks out again. The following morning, he receives an email containing a video of him killing a man with a crowbar. The stranger calls and threatens to give the video to the police if Allex goes to the hospital again. Allex learns that the mysterious scientist is making him kill people while drunk as a perverse method of curing his alcohol addiction. The scar on his chest hides the device used to control Allex.

Allex seeks help from his tech friend Chad. Afterward, Allex returns to the bar and drinks again. This time, Allex kills a fellow barfly named Gail while unconscious.

Chad installs a motion sensor camera in Allex’s living room to see if they can capture the scientist accosting Allex on video. Chad also puts a tracking app on Allex’s phone so that they can retrace any moves he makes while unconscious. After his next blackout, Allex follows the app back to a crime scene where he discovers that he murdered his boss.

Allex packs his vehicle and escapes to the desert. He continues drinking and ends up murdering another woman. He then uses a pocketknife to cut the metal device out of his chest. Chad finds Allex and appears to recognize the metal object.

Allex flees the desert. The scientist follows and captures Allex. He takes Allex to a lab where he reveals his intention of curing Allex before performing another experiment. After the operation, the scientist takes Allex home.

To draw the scientist out, Allex pretends to drink again, although he actually consumes iced tea. After a back and forth struggle between the two men, Allex eventually kills the scientist and escapes his lab.

Realizing that Chad was the person who supplied the scientist with the technology, Allex lures his former friend back to the desert. There, Allex drops Chad into an inescapable hole and leaves him there.

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Review:

Seven months after the death of his wife, Allex still copes by visiting the local dive bar frequently, and by wrapping up each booze-hazed evening with a memory-killing blackout.  Allex doesn’t seem to be too interested in beating his addiction, although someone else certainly is.  Without warning, a stranger with a scalpel in one hand and a hypodermic needle in the other mysteriously appears and offers Allex an unsolicited, and unconventional, solution to his drinking problem.

After a freshly stitched surgical scar appears on his chest, Allex’s nightly blackouts end up accompanied by a dead body to dispose of each following day.  Without any indication as to how or why, this mysterious scientist is inexplicably determined to teach Allex that addiction has consequences.  And until Allex learns to control his inner demons, those consequences will continue to be devastatingly fatal.

“Malignant” is less of a visceral horror thriller and more of an intentional metaphor for grief, loss, coping, and addiction.  As such, it makes “Malignant” admirable for injecting intelligent depth inside its plotline when many similarly themed efforts in the genre never give a second thought to subtleties or nuance.  Yet that is a surgical blade cutting two ways as its intangible intentions also make “Malignant” a mostly one-man show that has a hard time creating enough entertaining reasons to stay tuned for its message.

By design, Allex is a nondescript Average Joe with an unidentified 9-to-5 cubicle job and nothing of import happening in his humdrum life aside from pining for a deceased spouse.  It is a deflated depiction intended to be broad so Allex can be as relatable as possible to any viewer putting him or herself in Allex’s shoes.

Except Allex is portrayed as so unspecific and so singularly focused on pickling his liver that he is an unsympathetic bore.  That is a very big problem when Allex features in every scene in the movie, and often as the only person onscreen.  It is a challenge for the audience to find a tether into the fantasy when the main character has no interesting qualities functioning as a magnet and instead reads as a distantly hollow figure.

Allex’s struggle is primarily an internal one.  Much of “Malignant” is Allex silently puzzling out the mystery of what is happening to him and why as he moves wordlessly from scene to scene.  That means actor Gary Cairns’ performance is comprised of a great deal of moping around with a pensively pained expression perpetually worn on his face.  Things progress to a point where feeling sorry for a man who refuses to remove his wife’s picture from his iPhone desktop, and who continues to drink even though someone dies every time he does so, is a big ask even of a viewer less prone to cynicism.

The mysterious scientist acting as Allex’s foil is not Brad Dourif’s most inspired performance.  Even Dourif’s least memorable roles are still somehow fascinating in the moment though, and he does make “Malignant” a stronger film.  But just like Allex, Dourif’s mad scientist is too flatly scripted for even a master of quirk craftsmanship to make the antagonist truly pop.  And much like the entirety of the film itself, Dourif’s role requires a healthier infusion of more personalized oomph to keep the film’s tempo from sagging as much as it regrettably does.

The idea behind what “Malignant” wants to say with its story clearly has thoughtful layers for those patient enough to wait out a slow burn and sift through the subtext.  Perhaps those more personally connected to themes of addiction struggles will find better reasons to engage with the metaphorical overtones.  But above all else, “Malignant” is the partly quiet portrait of one man’s battle against grief through a realized nightmare scenario.  And ultimately, the personalities providing the fulcrum are too weak to bear the weight of a moody character study burdened by this much underdeveloped psychological drama.

Review Score:  50

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