Anya Taylor-Joy had a big 2024 working with acclaimed directors, between her surprise cameo in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, and her starring role in George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. The actor indeed snagged the role of Imperator Furiosa in Miller’s newest action epic thanks to the recommendation of another big-name director, Edgar Wright, who cast her in his dreamy 2021 horror film Last Night in Soho.
Oscar-nominated director David O’Russell also dialed Taylor-Joy’s number, casting her in his 2022 all-star period film Amsterdam, as did M. Night Shyamalan, who put the actor in his Unbreakable sequels Split and Glass. But the first major filmmaker to recognize Taylor-Joy’s talents was Robert Eggers, whose 2015 psychological-horror movie The Witch proved to be the actor’s breakthrough. Taylor-Joy returned to the wild world of Eggers for 2022’s brutal revenge film The Northman.
Did you know: Stephen King praised The Witch, tweeting “The Witch scared the hell out of me. And it’s a real movie, tense and thought-provoking as well as visceral.”
Fast on the heels of her breakout performance in The Witch, Taylor-Joy popped up on Ridley Scott’s radar screen, leading to the legendary filmmaker casting her in Morgan, a sci-fi/horror film he produced, with his son Luke Scott taking the reins for his directorial debut. The younger Scott had the privilege of guiding a talented cast on his first film, including Kata Mara, Toby Jones, Rose Leslie, Boyd Holbrook, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Yeoh and Paul Giamatti.
That all-star cast can be seen in support of Taylor-Joy when Morgan finds a new streaming home on Max beginning on January 1, 2025. The film hits the streamer nine years after its 2016 theatrical release.
A sci-fi story along the lines of M3GAN and Ex Machina, Morgan stars Taylor-Joy as an artificial being, created via a combination of sythesized DNA and nanotechnology, who begins exhibiting disturbing behavior at the research facility where she lives. The genetic-engineering company responsible for creating Morgan sends a risk-management specialist (Mara) to investigate the matter, and it soon becomes apparent that the company’s prized experiment is not everything she seems.
The elder Scott loves making sci-fi that explores moral and philosophical questions, and Morgan is no exception. The movie challenges viewers to ponder the very nature of humanity, while asking tough ethical questions about genetic engineering and other scientific endeavors that arguably cross the line into playing God. Though the movie is directed by Scott’s son, it retains a chilly, intellectual feel and set of thematic concerns similar to the elder Scott’s Prometheus and Raised By Wolves.
The questions raised by Morgan are indeed intriguing, but the movie’s main draw is its cast, which includes several Oscar nominees. Only someone with the elder Scott’s clout could draw so many big names to a movie with a budget of only around $8 million. But even among such an impressive cast of actors, Taylor-Joy stands out as Morgan, offering an early demonstration of the uncanny talents she would later display in acclaimed works like The Queen’s Gambit, The Menu and Furiosa.
The biggest highlight of the film is arguably Taylor-Joy, who first made a name for herself in this year’s The Witch. She is exceptionally disarming as Morgan, finding the right balance between creepy and sympathetic. Due to her physical appearance, a number of the scenes featuring Morgan come across as unsettling, but Taylor-Joy finds another layer to give the final product a bit more heart than it would have otherwise. – Morgan review
Morgan Facts |
|
Box Office (Budget) |
$8.8 million ($8 million) |
Rotten Tomatoes Critics’ Score |
38% |
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score |
30% |
A corporate risk-management consultant must decide whether or not to terminate an artificially created humanoid being.
Anya Taylor-Joy
, Michael Yare
, Jennifer Jason Leigh
, Boyd Holbrook
, Brian Cox
, Michelle Yeoh
, Kate Mara
, Rose Leslie
, Chris Sullivan
, Paul Giamatti
, Toby Jones
, Vinette Robinson
Luke Scott
Seth W. Owen
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