“Well, THAT came out of nowhere!” is something you’ll say as the third act of Malignant gets going.

Not to spoil it, but James Wan’s newest thriller, out Friday in theaters and streaming on HBO Max, takes such a hard right turn at one point that it’s almost comical.

The acclaimed horror director (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring and many more) apparently wanted to take a risk with his newest film, and he certainly did that. Malignant begins as a murder mystery before devolving into a violent, gory, supernatural-tinged horror movie that verges on an homage to Italian giallos, a la Dario Argento.

The movie begins in 1993, at an institution where Dr. Florence Weaver and her colleagues Victor Fields and John Gregory are treating a psychiatric patient named Gabriel. Gabriel, who we only see briefly and obscured by something, has somehow has acquired special powers like controlling electricity and broadcasting his thoughts via speakers. While the staff attempt to control him, he has a violent episode and kills several staff members of the institution.

Flash forward to the present day where a pregnant woman, Madison Lake (Annabelle Wallis, Peaky Blinders), is living in Seattle with her abusive husband Derek (Jake Abel, Supernatural). During an argument, he smashes Madison’s head against a wall. As Madison dreams of an intruder dispatching her husband, we see Derek being violently murdered downstairs. The killer, still in the house, attacks Madison, rendering her unconscious. 

Madison wakes up in the hospital where her sister, Sydney (Maddie Hasson, Impulse), tells her that her baby didn’t survive. The police suspect her but allow her to return home, where she envisions even more murders just as the doctors from the institution are attacked.

As Sydney (and the police) delve into Madison’s past, Madison’s back story is revealed. We find out that she was adopted from an institution as an older child, that she had a mysterious ailment, and an imaginary friend who was named Gregory. It all starts to add up to…something.

Madison goes from person of interest to prime suspect after the cops find a missing woman captive in her attic along with the murder weapon from the earlier deaths. She gets arrested, and that’s when things get weird.

To tell more would be to give away the one thing this movie has going for it: the element of surprise. Whether you find it breathtakingly daring or just inexplicably silly is up to you, but as plot twists go, it’s utterly bananas. Wallis tries to pull off her character’s transformation, but it’s possible that no actor could do what this movie makes her do and really sell it, so it’s hard to put all the blame on her for an unconvincing performance. Nothing that happens in the third act of this movie makes a whole lot of sense.

Still, as horror movies go, Malignant is quite gory and, yes, funny (intentional or not) so you may find it worth a watch, even if it’s not among Wan’s better pictures. It’s available on HBO Max at no extra charge for the next 30 days.