phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2023

Malum



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2023
Runtime: 1h 32m
Country: Italy, USA
Language: English
Genre Tags: Drama, Horror, Thriller
Plot Summary: A rookie police officer willingly takes the last shift at a newly decommissioned police station in an attempt to uncover the mysterious connection between her father's death and a vicious cult.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: Really captures the soft, changing dream logic of nightmares, and features some great practical effects and non-gratuitous jump scares. Do not expect much in the way of plot or character development. Yeah, there is some, but this is a movie running almost completely on mood. I'd have preferred a little more narrative, but it did wrap itself up well at the end.


Outside Reviews:

Matt Zoller Seitz
3 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

The movie takes its sweet time building to the commercially mandated jump scares, CGI blood plumes, and impressionist glimpses of mutilated faces and limbs (by RussellFX, whose sculptors must moonlight at the morgue). Once that phase of the movie kicks in, "Malum" becomes a dark labyrinth in a rented entertainment space where gruesome things periodically pop out at you, screeching and yowling, and there's blood on the walls, and the handful of working lights flicker drastically enough to create strobe-like effects, and you keep hearing a chorus of young women faintly singing a very old song, and hellish apparitions trudge out of the gloom and announce that they feast on angel's wings.