‘M3GAN’ explores the dark side of artificial smarts

Above : “M3GAN,” which features a killer AI, opens Friday. (Photo/Blumhouse)

In his 2021 novel “Klara and the Sun,” the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro wrote about a robotic entity – dubbed an AF, which stands for Artificial Friend.

The purpose of AFs is to act as companions for human children. And Klara, Ishiguro’s title character, is taken into a home to be with a young, sickly girl named Josie. And so we see, through Klara’s narration, what happens next.

It’s enough to say that she never kills anyone, even if she does her best to wreck a pollution-spewing vehicle that she refers to as a “Cootings Machine.”

Enter the film industry. Though the film being released Friday (officially, though there are screenings today), titled “M3GAN,” isn’t based on Ishiguro’s novel, its title character is similar to Klara. (It was directed by Gerard Johnstone .)

M3GAN (which stands for “Model 3 Generative Android”) is a robotic doll that is designed to be a child’s companion. In this case, though, the doll becomes something like Chucky (the satanic killer doll) or Annabelle (another killer doll carrying an evil spirit).

And this is because … well, some moviegoers like this stuff. Rather than debate the virtues, and dangers, of artificial intelligence, the way Steven Spielberg once did , they’ll settle for a simple story of incipient evil threatening humanity. Especially when accompanied by plenty of gore.

The critics seem to love it, too.

Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly wrote that Johnstone’s film is “A scampering Blumhouse caper that turns out to be blithely self-aware, negligibly jump-scary, and mostly very fun”

Variety’s Owen Gleiberman calls it “a diverting genre film, one that possesses a healthy sense of its own absurdity.”

And Hoai-Tran Bui of Inverse capped things up by writing, “From the moment that M3GAN twirled, twerked, and cartwheeled her way toward one of her many bloody kills in the latest Blumhouse movie, it was clear: Campy horror is in a new era, and it is thriving.”

Welcome to the year 2023, pilgrims.