If this poster were what I'd seen when scrolling through the Netflix options, it might have been clearer sooner that Florence Pugh was the star of Malevolent. It had already passed the test of having a short running time of only 88 minutes, but I clicked into the details to differentiate it from other contenders that were about the same length. Seeing that Pugh was the star did that plenty well.
(Despite the short running time and despite the presence of Pugh, I still fell asleep early on after my third white russian of the evening, a Tuesday night lockdown treat because I was taking Wednesday off for my son's 11th birthday. I didn't wake up from that "nap" until after 12:30, but still doggedly finished it up, afforded the luxury by not having to work the next day.)
You may recall that Pugh was one of my breakout discoveries of 2019, when I named her among "three who had a good year" in my year-end wrap-up post for her performances in Fighting With My Family, Midsommar and Little Women. After that diverse trio of roles, I knew there was nothing she couldn't do.
But then I had to wait for my next dose, as the delay of the release of Black Widow meant that Pugh followed up her dynamite 2019 with zero new releases in 2020. Black Widow took another half-year into 2021 to finally come out, and when it did, it was a disappointment -- both the movie in general and its use of Pugh.
So when I saw Pugh's name on Malevolent, there was a funny surge of urgency as I clicked on the play button. I want as much Pugh as I can get.
She did not disappoint here. I would not say this is a superior film -- I gave it a 3 out of 5 stars on Letterboxd -- but as you might expect, Pugh is a pro. She doesn't exceed the requirements of a film like this, but as was the case in her three films of 2019, she has a keen idea of the emotions each scene dictates. If you've got the kind of craft Pugh has, you elevate everything you are in. (To be fair, the film gave me chills a number of times, and I really liked its score. It also has a few creepy gestures toward the malevolence of its title. The idea of charlatan ghost hunters finding themselves involved in a real haunting has been done before, lots of times, but Malevolent managed to distinguish itself enough to warrant a recommendation.)
And regarding that malevolence, that brings me to the other "favorite" in the title of this post. I love the word "malevolent," and I use it in a fair amount of my reviews of films involving evil in some way, shape or form. Doing a search of that word in my reviews stored on my computer, I found it appearing in ten different reviews -- including, quite interestingly, Lady Macbeth, which is the first place I ever saw Pugh. (And in my review for the Macbeth proper starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, so I guess the word describes the Macbeths pretty well.) I suspect the word actually appears in more reviews than that, but some of them are stored on my work computer.
If we were going for least favorites, I don't know, maybe a movie called Plethora, starring Vicky Krieps? (I won't go into why I don't like either of these at the moment ... sometimes I like to leave you wondering. Though this post would give you a clue on the latter.)
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