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The film column

Be careful what you wish for In the chilling new sci-fi horror M3gan, a young
orphan is cared for by a new-generation android tasked with protecting her from
emotional and physical harm. What could possibly go wrong, asks Simon Ings

Cady (Violet McGraw)

listens as the android
M3gan reads to her

“Purrfect Petz” (fuzzballs that

quote Wikipedia while evacuating
plastic pellets) can’t possibly
understand this. The point of
parenting is to manage your own
Simon Ings is a novelist and failure, leaving a child capable of
science writer. His website handling the world on their own.
is simonings.net M3gan, on the contrary, has no
intention of letting Cady grow
GEOFFREY SHORT/UNIVERSAL STUDIOS

up. As far as it is concerned,

AFTER doing something
unspeakable to a school bully’s
Film
ear, chasing him through a forest
M3gan
like a wolf and then driving him
Gerard Johnstone
under the wheels of a passing car,
On general release
M3gan, the world’s first “Model 3
Generative Android”, returns to
Simon also comfort Cady, its inventor’s niece.
recommends... “We’ve learned a valuable lesson
today,” it whispers.
Book So has the audience: before
Metropolis you ask a learning machine to do
Thea von Harbou
“The point of parenting
something for you, it helps if you
This visionary novel,
know what that thing actually is.
written in tandem with the M3gan is tasked by its inventor,
screenplay to Fritz Lang’s Gemma (Allison Williams, who
movie of the same name, starred in production company
depicts a city more in love Blumhouse’s earlier smash hit,
with machines than people. Get Out), with caring for her niece,
Cady (Violet McGraw). Cady has
Film been orphaned after her parents
The Illustrated Man accidentally drove under a snow
Jack Smight truck during an argument about
Ray Bradbury’s short story policing her screen time.
collection The Illustrated M3gan is told to protect Cady
Man is turned into a film from physical and emotional
by Jack Smight. In one harm. What could possibly go
story, The Veldt, children wrong? Quite a lot, it turns out.
gambol across a virtual Gemma works for a toy company
reality savannah populated called Funki, whose CEO David
by man-eating lions. (Ronny Chieng) is looking for a
way – any way – to take a swipe
at Hasbro. In a rush to succeed,
Gemma ends up creating a
care robot that – to paraphrase
The Terminator – absolutely will
not stop caring. M3gan takes the
ordinary knocks that life dishes
out to Cady very personally.
The robot, depicted via a low-
budget mixture of masks and CGI,
performed by Amie Donald and
is to manage your own
failure, leaving a child
capable of handling the
world on their own”
voiced by Jenna Davis, is an
uncanny glory. But the signature
quality of Blumhouse’s films isn’t
so much its skill with low budgets
as a willingness to invest time and
money into scripts. In developing
M3gan, writers Akela Cooper and
James Wan – the latter of whom
directed the horror film Saw –
found there was greater currency
in mischief than in mayhem.
Caring for a child involves more
than just distracting them. Alas
M3gan, an evolution of Funki’s
experience is the enemy.
In this war, M3gan transforms,
naturally enough, into a killing
machine. Yet the android’s charge
is a far more frightening creation:
Cady is a bundle of hurt, afforded
no real guidance, adrift in a world
where she believes everything
will eventually go wrong or die. A
screaming 9-year-old slapping her
well-intentioned but workaholic
aunt across the face makes for
infinitely more disturbing viewing
than any scene involving M3gan.
“Robotic companionship may
seem a sweet deal,” wrote social
scientist Sherry Turkle in 2011’s
Alone Together, “but it consigns
us to a closed world – the loveable
as safe and made to measure.”
Cady, born into this world of
care robots, eventually learns that
the only way to get through life is
to grow up. But the real lesson is
for parents. Children aren’t meant
to be easy. They are meant to be
worthwhile. If we absent ourselves
from their lives, we are the ones
who will be left poorer.
At a conference on human-
machine interaction in 2014, I saw
a video starring an “educational
robot” called Nao. It took a while
before someone in the audience –
not me, to my shame – spotted the
obvious flaw: why does it show
a mother sweating away in the
kitchen while a robot is enjoying
quality time with her child? ❚

36 | New Scientist | 28 January 2023