M3GAN Film Score by Anthony Willis, reviewed by Jeromiah Taylor
photo: Film Music Reporter
Perhaps you’ve seen her dancing in a hallway; her gangly limbs swinging with sinister ease. Or perhaps you’ve seen her galloping on all fours through the woods, her neat pea-coat belying the blood she’s soon to shed. In whatever light you cast M3gan, the protagonist of her namesake movie, she seems to be in on a joke that we are not. We, human beings, are not privy to her inner-world: that of a cutting edge artificial intelligence designed to learn about, and protect, at all costs, the children we cannot be bothered to raise ourselves. The film tells the story of Gemma, a computer engineer for a toy company, who assumes legal guardianship of her niece, Cady, after her sister’s death. Inspired by her difficulty connecting with Cady, Gemma creates M3gan to meet her boss’s demands for a new, more competitive product. Taking a wealth of cues from the Child's Play franchise, M3gan walks the tight-rope of camp with all the agility of its antagonist.
The film is enhanced by its score, composed by Anthony Willis, who masterfully replicates the film’s tongue-in-cheek exercise in horror. Many of the compositions feature lush strings and plump keyboards, suggesting on the surface all the manufactured optimism and sincere commerce of the tech industry. Yet almost every piece possesses a melancholic doubt, a worried counterpoint. This counterpoint, though never blatantly sinister, is eerie. The suspicion that something is too good to be true, now a trope of cautionary tales about technological advancement, sneaks into the film and the score immediately. Both the characters and the audience feel as though they have seen something in their peripheral vision that they would rather not think about. Although blinders-on self-deceit is a real human proclivity, it does not last long in M3gan. Refreshingly, Gemma heeds the counterpoint before it is too late.
Not content to be just another apocalyptic tale, M3gan succeeds, almost incidentally, at being an effective personal drama. Despite the fact that M3gan the character has instantly joined the ranks of beloved horror antagonists like Chucky, Jason, and Annabelle, AI serves only an allegorical function in the film. Motherhood is the thematic crux of M3gan. The loss of one mother, the reluctance of a surrogate, and the lethal eagerness of an artificial one. Loss, surrogate, artificial. With those three words, we might be getting close to the heart of M3gan: a heart devastated by loss, roving for relief, and jumping at the false-promise of panacea. Maternity is thematically integral not only to the film but also to the score, which alludes to the diabolical lullaby of Rosemary's Baby. That haunting "la la la." especially influences "On the Subject of Death.'' The two tracks in the score that feature vocals are lullabies. In "Tell Me Your Dreams," M3gan sings to Cady:
If you should feel alone/Or that your world has come apart/Just reach out and you’ll see a friend is never very far./Tell me your dreams, I will dream them too,/I’m so glad I finally found you.
In the most memorable scene, M3gan, who has just dismembered a boy who bullied Cady, tucks Cady into bed. Cady asks whether M3gan hurt the boy. After offering a vague response, M3gan sings a snippet of Sia’s “Titanium” to lull Cady into sleep. The chorus, “you shoot me down/ but I don’t fall/ I am titanium,” takes on a new meaning in the context of the film, as M3gan is literally made of titanium. Sia recorded a full acoustic version of the song, called “Titanium (M3gan’s Version),” in which the heart-stopping anthemic quality of the original is liberated from the deadweight of its electronic production. Over sparse, unresolved piano chords, Sia unleashes a nuclear event of a vocal performance, where that undeniable melody finds full fruition.
Not only maternal, M3gan is distinctly feminine. In fact, M3gan draws a triangle between Gemma, Cady, and M3gan, all female (ostensibly in M3gan's case), characters. The goings on of men are restricted to the outside world, a world the film makes sure to sketch only in necessary detail. The real world of M3gan is the relationships between the three. A complicated family dynamic if there ever was one. Where M3gan owes her existence to Gemma and Gemma owes her professional reputation to M3gan. Where Cady, despite relying on Gemma, feels deeply torn between her aunt and her best friend: the machine who assuages her grief with all the devoted attention Gemma can never seem to spare. Echoing the cramped domestic drama of the film, the score uses sonic cues to conjure a twisted ambience of Saturday morning cartoons, ill-fated outings, and the incongruity between the juvenile and adult worlds. These cues are reflected in the track titles: “Those Aren’t Toys,” “Reluctant Guardian,” and “Attachment Theory.”
Despite its necessary handling of artificial intelligence, M3gan stands resolutely in the personal. Though the film does indulge in a few blundered moments of social commentary, it largely avoids the fate of too many horror movies neutered by their own ambition. M3gan triumphs over its thematic potholes through its aesthetic might. The film's lasting impression is neither sermon nor exploit, but a truthful analogy for grief and the dire consequences of trying to outrun it. The score echoes the film in every respect with its nuanced inversion of the plastic and its probing queries into the merit of feeling good in a bad world.
M3GAN Film Score by Anthony Willis, 2022.