A Horror Movie About How Algorithms Are Dumb
Plus, one of the most brilliantly frustrating documentaries ever made.
January tends to be a dumping ground for new movies, and with every studio terrified of going up against Avatar: The Way of Water, this January has been January-ing extra hard. Even as someone who has been arguing for years that you never want to bet against James Cameron, I was skeptical the new Avatar could equal one of the first's most impressive feats: topping the domestic box office for seven weeks in a row. But at this point, it looks like a forgone conclusion; a month after its release, the movie is still selling out screenings, and the first movie in its weight class, Marvel’s latest Ant-Man sequel, doesn’t even come along until Feb. 17.
But while’s it’s not anywhere near challenging Pandora’s dominance, there’s been a scrappy contender for Avatar 2’s crown in the form of a murderous animatronic doll. M3gan isn’t making much in the way of waves on a global scale, but in the U.S. it’s been an out-of-the-box hit, a cannily programmed counterpart to both Oscar-bound expansions and thunderous blockbusters. It’s smart but dumb, savvy but unpretentious, and crammed with enough WTF moments that they could stuff a trailer full of viral images and still leave few surprises for the actual release. I’m not entirely sold; as you can hear in my appearance on the Film Comment podcast, it feels to me like a movie that was conceived as a series of memes and then very loosely built up around them. (We—that being me, Film Comment editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute, and critic Nicholas Russell—also get into Avatar, Babylon, and Glass Onion. It’s a really fun discussion.) But I’m still happy to see it taking off, or the fact that it put thoughts in my head I’m still kicking around weeks later.
I wrote about M3gan on a tight deadline, and as sometimes happens, I got to the most interesting ideas just as I was wrapping up. So I thought I’d take a beat to expand on them a little here. Although it’s been sold as a movie about runway A.I., M3gan is really a movie about something much more mundane and less fantastical: the triumph of the algorithm. We’re told that this 4-foot-tall creation, basically an oversized American Girl doll with enough strength to snap a man’s neck, has the ability to learn, but it’s actually its inability to extrapolate that makes it dangerous. The brainchild of a congenitally single software designer played by Alison Williams, Megan—the “3” is just an invention of the movie’s marketing team—is rushed into beta testing when her newly orphaned niece comes to stay with her. Williams, the kind of person who owns shelves full of mint-in-box toy collectibles but would never dream of actually playing with them, instructs Megan to do what she thinks parents are supposed to do, which is to shield the child from any kind of harm, whether physical or emotional. But she doesn’t consider the consequences of issuing that instruction without any further restrictions. Does that mean ripping the ear off a bully who’s giving the girl a hard time, or murdering the neighbor who yells mean things over her fence? And what about the therapist who’s trying to help the girl work through her feelings about her parents’ death? All Megan sees is a grownup making her cry. (The theatrical version of M3gan in release is a toned-down PG-13 cut, but I have to imagine that in the original, “way gorier” first draft, the therapist must have met with a particularly unpleasant fate.)
Over the past 15 years or so, we’ve gradually ceded the functions once performed by writers and retail clerks to crowdsourcing and the opacity of the algorithm. Rather than follow an individual critic, we check a movie’s ranking on Rotten Tomatoes, or just click on whatever Netflix thinks we might like. It’s a good strategy if your main goal is staving off disappointment: While it doesn’t tell you anything about whether critics loved a film, Rotten Tomatoes’ “fresh” percentage does tell you how many thought it was at least okay, and by favoring a narrow range of similarities—if you liked this action movie with the Rock, perhaps you’ll like this other action movie with the Rock—recommendation algorithms more or less guarantee you won’t end up watching something that’s a total bust. But they’re also guaranteed to never take you outside of your comfort zone, to point you towards the kind of out-of-the-blue discovery that a friend or a critic or even dumb luck can.
What concerns me most is that we’ve grown so accustomed to a world shaped by algorithms that we’ve devalued other kinds of discovery, the kinds more likely to lead to both disappointment and revelation. Play Apple Music’s “Taylor Swift Radio,” as we did the other night, and you’ll get a stream of things that sound like Taylor Swift—basically pop songs by white women from the last 10 years—which is pleasant and unobtrusive enough to score a family dinner and a game of Skip-Bo. But it won’t suggest that if you like young women singing about their own experiences, you might like Lucy Dacus as much as Katy Perry or Ariana Grande. Even Taylor Swift, who picked Phoebe Bridgers and Paramore as openers on her next tour, has more adventurous taste than that.
Along those lines, here’s one extremely non-algorithmic recommendation: Leigh Ladare’s documentary The Task, which is now streaming on the Criterion Channel. Although it’s not technically a part of the channel’s month-long series on cinéma vérité, Ladare’s bedeviling doc fits right in, especially with the term as it was originally defined. Coined by the ethnographic filmmaker Edgar Morin, the idea of cinéma vérité was not the fly-on-the-wall aesthetic of American direct cinema but something closer to its opposite: that because the presence of the camera inevitably changes people’s behavior, the only thing it captures—the only thing it can ever capture—is how they react to that presence. As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it, it is “the truth of cinema, and not the cinema of truth.”
It’s best to go into The Task knowing almost nothing, as I did when I saw it at the True/False film festival in 2018, which remains one of the most intense experiences I’ve ever had in a theater. (You can, however, read what I wrote about it then.) In essence, it drops you into a group therapy session of people who don’t know how or why they’ve been brought together, and tracks the increasingly tense and complicated dynamics as they try to figure out what they’re doing there. Originally conceived as part of a gallery installation, Ledare’s movie wasn’t initially intended for release, and for legal reasons, it’s been tricky to both distribute and exhibit. But it’s fascinating and genuinely unlike anything you’ve ever seen, and hopefully that’s recommendation enough.
With that, I’m out until the Sundance Film Festival, which begins on Thursday. It’s the first time in three years Sundance has taken place in person, but in a welcome holdover from the pandemic era, nearly all of its movies will also be available to watch at home once they’ve premiered in Park City. I’ll be back with highlights from the Festival, but for now check out the program online, and if something sounds interesting: take a chance. It might surprise you.