Malignant Review & Hidden References You Missed

The Well-Delivered Twist

We’ll start off with a positive point here: for most cinemagoers (including myself) there was absolutely no way that we could guess the film’s big twist. It’s so insane and so absolutely left-field that for the naive-brained among us, there wasn’t a hope in hell we could preconceive what would happen.

There’s a lot to be said for a film these days that can absolutely blind-side you. Some of the very best bits of cinema, both horror and otherwise, get a huge bit of their cred for pulling off a good twist. It embodies the cinema experience, being able to sit there alongside 50 other strangers all gasping at exactly the same time and going “no !*$% way did that just happen?”, and for all this movie’s downfalls (which trust me, we’ll get to), its twist was nothing short of genius.

Still, it didn't entirely come out of nowhere. While we couldn't guess the exact specifics, because of Wan’s strong knowledge and appreciation of horror from eras gone by, we could start guessing in the right direction at least based on similar films we'd seen previously - meaning that his love-letter to horror pastiche clearly came through.

So, the twist (I’ll just say it, I’ve warned you for spoilers) is that Gabriel is actually a parasitic twin living on the back of Madison's brain. Wan seeded this so well that, even if it was a certified shocker, it wasn’t disconnected or unbelievable.

Evil twins and psychotic siblings are one of horror’s most beloved antagonist/protagonist pairings. We’ve got certified classics like Basket Case, The Dark Half, Happy Birthday To Me and about a million more, so as soon as we found out that Madison had a brother we sort of guessed that it was going down this route.

We didn’t guess exactly where it was going but we were on the right track!

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