Machination is a 2022 Maltese horror thriller about a woman spiraling during a global pandemic, and somehow the most frightening thing about it is the runtime. Written, produced, and directed by Sarah Jayne and Ivan Malekin, it stars Steffi Thake as Maria, an anxious, fragile soul trapped in self-isolation, surrounded by fear, memories, and metaphorical monsters. On paper, that sounds like a potent setup for psychological horror. In practice, it often feels like watching an extended experimental student film about anxiety that escaped into the wild and found a distributor by accident.
This is a “bad review with dark humor,” so let’s be clear: Machination isn’t unwatchable. It’s worse than that—it’s almostgood. It has just enough interesting choices and sincere effort to tease you with potential before repeatedly tripping over its own symbolism like a filmmaker who discovered metaphor last week and refuses to put it down.
Pandemic Horror or Prolonged PSA?
The film is set against the backdrop of a global pandemic, with news reports screaming about infection rates, panic, and uncertain futures. Humanity is gripped by fear, society is unraveling, and the world feels hostile and unstable. This could be fertile ground for horror—paranoia, isolation, the invisible enemy outside and the festering dread inside. But Machination doesn’t so much explore these themes as it does repeat them, like an overcaffeinated therapy session stuck on rewind.
Maria, played by Steffi Thake, is alone in her house, spiraling into fear, guilt, and mental collapse. That’s the whole movie. She scrolls, she frets, she panics, she remembers, she flinches, she stares. The film wants to be an immersive portrait of internalized terror, but too often it plays like a pandemic-era “art film” about anxiety designed to impress festival programmers who confuse discomfort with depth.
If you ever wanted to relive peak lockdown with worse lighting and more melodramatic breathing, this is your moment.
One-Woman Show… and It Shows
Steffi Thake shoulders almost the entire movie. That’s a cruel weight to put on any actor, especially in a film that offers so little variety in scenes. She’s asked to do a lot of heavy lifting: breakdowns, panic attacks, quiet despair, outsized reactions to mundane events. She tries—sincerely—but the script often gives her nothing to work with beyond “be upset again, but louder.”
Maria is described as sensitive and anxious, but the film treats those traits less as character and more as a constant state. There’s very little progression—just iteration. She starts anxious, continues anxious, and ends… anxious but sweatier. We’re supposed to dig into her backstory and past trauma, but the emotional beats feel more sketched than developed. It’s as if the film expects that simply mentioning trauma is enough to make us care, rather than actually dramatizing it in a meaningful way.
The supporting cast—Rambert Attard as Yorgen, Sean James Sutton as Ian, Andrew Bonello as Peter, Mikhail Basmadjian as Father—float in and out of the story like ghosts of bad decisions. They exist mostly in relation to Maria’s psyche, but since her inner world is drawn with such broad, fuzzy strokes, they don’t leave much of an impact. You remember them as “that guy who was in that one upsetting memory,” not as real people.
Monsters Within, Monsters Without, But Mostly Monotony
The official line is that Maria must confront “the monsters that surround her… both without and within.” Great. Love a dual threat. The problem is that the film leans so hard into metaphor that it forgets to be engaging moment to moment.
The external monsters—pandemic news, societal pressure, vague menace—never really coalesce into anything concrete. The internal monsters—guilt, shame, past trauma—are underscored with aggressive sound design, frantic editing, and visual clichés we’ve all seen in a dozen low-budget horror shorts. Sink water, dirty dishes, messy apartments, mirrors, fragmented flashbacks: it’s like someone fed “indie horror anxiety aesthetic” into a blender and poured the result onto a 90-minute timeline.
At times, Machination feels like a feature-length expansion of what should’ve been a tight, 20-minute short. You can almost see the bones of a strong short film in there—a concentrated burst of dread and introspection. Instead, we get repetition disguised as atmosphere, and moodiness stretched thin enough to see daylight through it.
Aesthetic Choices: Grim, Grey, and Grating
Visually, the film opts for a gritty, claustrophobic style: cramped rooms, unflattering lighting, a color palette trapped somewhere between “sickly beige” and “depressed grey.” On one hand, sure, that matches the tone. On the other, there’s a fine line between “evoking suffocating dread” and “looking like you accidentally set the white balance wrong and just went with it.”
The camera often lingers on Maria’s face, her body language, her surroundings. That can be powerful… if you vary your framing, your blocking, your emotional beats. Machination mostly doubles down on lingering. We get it: she’s anxious. At a certain point, the lack of visual dynamism stops being an artistic statement and starts feeling like the film is punishing you for staying.
The sound design is similarly insistent—whispers, echoes, overlapping noises, distorted effects. Used sparingly, that could have been an effective way to mimic intrusive thoughts. Used this much, it turns into a sonic assault that says, “In case you missed it, she’s suffering.” Subtlety is not on the call sheet.
Pandemic as Backdrop, Not Insight
Using the pandemic as a horror setting is risky. Done well, it can tap into collective trauma and give us catharsis. Done poorly, it feels like emotional opportunism dressed up as art. Machination leans closer to the latter.
The film knows people were scared, isolated, and spiraling, but it doesn’t seem to have much to say about it beyond “Wasn’t that awful?” There’s no sharper commentary or unexpected angle. No exploration of social failures, institutional breakdown, or the absurdity of “normal” expectations in a world gone sideways. Instead, it uses the pandemic as an amplifier for Maria’s personal issues, but never quite connects the dots in an insightful way.
It’s like the movie walked into the room, pointed at your memories of 2020, and said, “Same.” That’s not commentary; that’s a shrug with dramatic lighting.
Emotional Honesty, Narrative Flatline
To be fair, there’s a clear sincerity in the way Machination deals with mental health. It doesn’t mock Maria’s anxiety; it doesn’t treat her suffering as a gimmick. This is a film that takes its protagonist’s inner turmoil seriously. That’s admirable.
But sincerity alone doesn’t make for compelling storytelling. The narrative doesn’t build so much as swirl. We keep circling the same emotional drain, hoping for either a plunge into madness or a breakthrough—and instead getting more circling. By the time the film reaches its conclusion, you’re less concerned with how Maria will resolve her demons and more concerned with whether you remembered to turn your own lights off at home.
The ending aims for thematic closure, but it doesn’t hit hard enough to justify the slow, grinding descent that came before. It’s less “revelation” and more “okay, we’re done now.”
Final Diagnosis: Anxiety by Attrition
Machination wants to be a raw, intimate portrait of a woman mentally disintegrating under the weight of global crisis and personal trauma. It occasionally touches that goal—there are flashes where the performance, imagery, and sound click into something genuinely unsettling. But those moments are buried under repetition, overstatement, and a script that mistakes endurance for depth.
As a horror thriller, it’s too meandering to thrill and too obvious to truly horrify. As a character study, it never takes Maria far enough beyond “anxious woman in distress” to make her feel like more than a vessel for themes.
If you’re deeply into minimalist psychological horror and don’t mind a film that feels like quarantining inside someone else’s panic attack, Machination might resonate with you. For most viewers, though, it will feel like a cinematic echo of the worst days of lockdown: long, claustrophobic, and full of tension that never quite pays off—only this time, you willingly pressed play.
