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Horror movies tend to scratch at nagging psychological itches that we have as a society. Which is why we’ve had quite a few recently about the moral implications of creating artificial intelligence or lab-created life. There was Steven Spielberg’s gorgeous and sleek A.I. in 2001, the rather crude but fascinating and ultimately very unsettling Splice in 2009, and in 2015, we got director Alex Garland’s moody, thrilling look at A.I. in Ex Machina. Garland’s film may not have any direct influence on director Luke Scott’s Morgan, which hit theaters in 2016, but the vibes have a good amount of overlap.
In Morgan, Anya Taylor-Joy (from The Witch and Split) plays the title character, a young girl created in a lab using nanotechnology, the great catch-all of 21st century science fiction. Morgan followed several failed experiments at creating life, and if the mere fact that she’s in a movie didn’t give you a clue, the fact that she violently attacks a scientist played by Jennifer Jason Leigh in the opening minutes of the film should be your next clue. The only problem with the scene is that it keeps us from seeing its characters faces, especially since the young Taylor-Joy is fast becoming an actor who could stack up against someone like Jennifer Jason Leigh in a scene.
Making her breakthrough in last year’s The Witch, Taylor-Joy showed a canny ability to feel authentically like a child but with an intelligence behind her eyes that sets her apart. In The Witch, it meant she was the girl in her Puritan separatist family who fell under suspicion for witchcraft. Early last year, in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, Taylor-Joy played a kidnapped girl haunted by childhood trauma who has to deal with James McAvoy and all his alters. In both films, it was impossible to take your eyes off of Taylor-Joy, who does more with suspense and stillness than nearly any younger actor working today.
In Morgan, you can pretty much guess where this is all going. Luke Scott — son of Ridley — gives everything a cold, foggy atmosphere, and the cast (which includes Kate Mara, Michelle Yeoh, Rose Leslie, and Paul Giamatti) is top notch. But the story of the modern-day Frankenstein’s monster, in the guise of a scientifically engineered teenage girl, can only really go in one direction. When Morgan starts killing people, though, it’s Taylor Joy’s watchful stillness that lingers.
