Who needs parents when you’ve got an increasingly sentient android who can cater to your every need? It’s not a question often asked, but it’s one M3GAN flippantly answers. Indeed, Blumhouse Productions’ latest satirical horror sees Chucky reborn, thanks to a toy whose sweetness is slowly subverted into something more sinister.

The Dr Frankenstein to M3GAN’s AI monster is Gemma, a gifted engineer who wants to redefine what a toy can provide for children. In what is effectively the lead role, Allison Williams holds the film together brilliantly, carrying the right amount of hubris while clearly caught on uncommon ground when forced to care for her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). It’s no real spoiler to say that Cady is thrust into Gemma’s care due to a tragic incident, and her coping mechanism for this grief increasingly becomes the android she is effectively gifted with. It’s no surprise, either, to say that M3GAN’s protective instincts – hardwired into her by Gemma – become increasingly violent. And so escalates the plot.

Even if the story is fairly predictable, M3GAN does take glee in delivering on the audience’s expectations. The android, voiced by Jenna Davis, played by Amie Donald, balances its butter-wouldn’t-melt exterior with a knowingly maniacal side eye, and there is a huge amount of fun to be had with its (her?) acerbic line readings. Thanks to a viral marketing presence, M3GAN has been dubbed a horror film for the TikTok generation, and there is the sensation that it was conceived as a series of short, easily clippable scenes. Beyond the dance which has whistled through TikTok, M3GAN’s cutting asides and jerky movements – neither robotic nor wholly human – are designed to be mimicked and repeated.

Quite whether M3GAN succeeds as a social commentary or satire is another story. There are some arch comments on the abrogation of parental responsibilities in favour of screentime and technology, but the film isn’t overly concerned about commenting on the snowballing sentience of AI. More so, and more disappointingly, the film really does suffer from its PG-13 rating. While the jump scares and transitions are set up in a knowingly cineliterate way, the camerawork so often sands over these horror-inflected edges. While this has likely been done to ensure a broader audience, there isn’t a lot of bite to the film.

As a result, there is something ersatz to M3GAN. An undeniably fun, horror-adjacent, social-commentary-adjacent film which lacks the spark to really come to life. With that said, it whistles through its runtime, and its status as a ‘Cult Classic’ is already crystallising.