Malignant Review: 5 Ups & 5 Downs

3. The Unconvincing Ensemble Cast

In addition to the roughshod script, the cast is also completely all over the place, if unavoidably at the mercy of the material.

Front-and-center we have Annabelle Wallis as protagonist Madison, and while Wallis has been a fairly stale presence in numerous prior high-profile movies (namely Annabelle, The Mummy, and Tag), here she proves herself incapable of convincingly tackling a more challenging lead role.

The script calls for the actress to go to some fraught emotional places, but her performance, alternating between wooden and excessively histrionic, is more likely to rouse accidental laughs than anything.

In the supporting stakes, Maddie Hasson plays Madison's sister Sydney and somewhat understandably fails to elevate the lame-brained comic relief dialogue she's saddled with.

Similarly, George Young and Michole Briana White seem completely lost as the walking cliche cops pursuing Gabriel's parade of slaughter.

Again, most of the film's actors are helpless against a scrawled-on-a-napkin screenplay that does them no favours at all, but the performances also fail to shape the writing into much that can ever be taken seriously.