The Scariest Thing About em M3gan /em

This weekend, I succumbed to the pull of all the meme-y marketing and went to the theater to see the surprise horror-comedy hit M3gan. I generally enjoyed it--the jokes are funny, the jump scares effective, the robot-centric plot a rather smart addition to our fresh new wave of artificial intelligence anxiety. It isn't the goriest or most frightening flick--the blood streams had to stay PG-13--but the steadily paced tension and the references to horror classics do their job fine. Yet, to me, the most chilling aspect of the movie doesn't come from anything you might expect: the offscreen murders, M3gan's deranged humanoid face, the pressures of capitalism. It actually stems from a deceptively insignificant 10-second scene that comes about halfway through the movie, in which the titular bot takes to the house piano. To be clear, I don't find this scene so viscerally terrifying for the piano tune itself (in the film, a solid instrumental cover of Martika's 1989 No. 1 hit "Toy Soldiers"), or for the overall menace of the moment, a turning point in M3gan's development.