31 by 31 Challenge #12: MALEVOLENT (2018)

Netflix is dropping all sorts of freaky features for spooky streaming this month. Some are hyped, like the new Haunting of Hill House adaptation and Apostle, and others have just popped up quietly, like the new haunted house film Malevolent. Creaky steps and slamming doors abound, but is it anything more than yet another attempt to rip off The Conjuring? Read on and find out...

Malevolent
Released: October 5, 2018
Director: Olaf de Fleur
Screenplay: Ben Ketai & Eva Konstantopoulos

Cast:
Florence Pugh as Angela
Ben-Lloyd Hughes as Jackson
Celia Imrie as Mrs. Green
Scott Chambers as Elliot
Georgina Bevan as Beth


Angela and her brother Jackson run a paranormal investigation business wherein Angela, using her "gift," gets pesky spirits to cease tormenting the living and grant them peace. The trouble is, Angela is a fake, and the business is a scam. When Angela develops a conscience and grows tired of fooling people, she attempts to put an end to the lies; but Jackson has run afoul of the mob and he needs her to continue to pay off his debt. He convinces his sister to help him with one last job at an old manor house where several young girls were murdered years prior. Once there, it's not long before Angela begins experiencing real contact with the dead and becomes resolved to find out what happened to the girls and put their souls to rest.

Are you bored yet? Good Lord if that isn't the blandest description of a ghost movie ever. But let's see if we can compliment-sandwich this bad boy, out of our societal loyalty to Netflix. The actors, though not given much to work with, do a fine job. The brother-sister duo play convincing siblings and do their best to communicate a depth to their characters that no one in the writer's room bothered with developing. Hughes is convincingly desperate when faced with his mounting debt, and Pugh gets a chance for some interesting physical work when Angela is struck ill by her repeated visions of the little girl ghosts because...well it's never really clear why.

Quite a lot about this movie isn't clear, in fact. The villain's motive, the connection between the dead girls and Angela, why anyone would want to make this movie...but worse than all of that, it's an exceedingly dull movie. Nothing even remotely scary happens, at any point, ever. Every moment that's coded as frightening is broadcast from miles away with tractor-sized high beams, and nothing's original. Every scare is ripped off from older, better movies which makes the end result all the more frustrating because clearly, the writers know horror cinema. But instead of using their knowledge to avoid well-trodden material, they just retread it in the most vanilla way imaginable. 

Malevolent is a waste of good streaming time and especially heinous given all the great horror material Netflix could be promoting on their server, not to mention the content that they're in competition with on other services. Avoid the paint-by-number characters, the Swiss cheese plot, and the corny dialogue and keep swiping on this one, or the only one feeling malevolent will be you.


Malevolent
5 - Totally Terrifying
4 - Crazy Creepy
3 - Fairly Frightening
2 - Slightly Scary
1 - Hardly Horror