Spiderhead (2022) poster

Spiderhead (2022)

Rating:


USA. 2022.

Crew

Director – Joseph Koisinski, Screenplay – Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick, Based on the Short Story Escape from Spiderhead by George Saunders, Producers – Agnes Chu, Tommy Harper, Chris Hemsworth, Eric Newman, Rhett Reese, Jeremy Steckler, Geneva Wasserman & Paul Wernick, Photography – Claudio Miranda, Music – Joseph Trapanese, Visual Effects Supervisor – Ryan Tudhope, Visual Effects – Instinctual (Supervisor – Alan Latteri), Lola | VFX (Supervisor – Edson Williams), Mr Wolf (Supervisor – Danny Yoon), Netfx (Supervisor – Jiwoong Kim), Pixomondo (Supervisors – Marco Maldonado & Mark Spindler), Method Studios (Supervisor – Don Hellier), Special Effects Supervisor – Julian Summers, Production Design – Jeremy Hindle. Production Company – Grand Electric/The New Yorker Studios.

Cast

Miles Teller (Jeff), Chris Hemsworth (Steve Abnesti), Jurnee Smollett (Lizzie Harris), Mark Ragulo (Verlaine), Tess Haubrich (Heather), Nathan Jones (Rogan), Angie Milliken (Sarah), Joey Vieria (Miguel), Stephen Tongun (Ray), Sam Delich (Adam), BeBe Bettancourt (Emma)


Plot

Scientist Steve Abnesti runs the Spiderhead penal institution where assorted prisoners have been placed into his care for a series of pharmaceutical trials. Jeff is one of the inmates in the open-plan prison, having been convicted for manslaughter over a DUI charge that killed two passengers in the vehicle he was driving including his girlfriend. Jeff and the other inmates are subject to various experiments where they are given drugs that alter emotional response, making them uncontrollably laugh, become more descriptive or experience intense fear. Jeff has formed an attraction to one of the other inmates Lizzie. Abnesti now places Jeff in an experiment where he uses a drug that causes Jeff and two other women to feel intense love for another. In order to determine if Jeff still has residual feelings for either of the women, Abnesti gives Jeff the choice whether to administer a dosage of the Darkenfloxx drug that will place either of the women into a state of fear. It is then that things start to go wrong.


Spiderhead comes from Joseph Kosinski, the director of films like Tron Legacy (2010), Oblivion (2013), Only the Brave (2015) and the huge hit of Top Gun: Maverick (2022). One suspects that the massive success of Top Gun: Maverick factored into the release of SpiderheadTop Gun: Maverick went into wide release on May 27, 2022 and Spiderhead gives impression of being a film that was sitting on the shelf and was rushed out to take advantage of this, having its premiere on Netflix two weeks later at a point when Top Gun: Maverick was still No 1 release at the US box-office. The script comes from the writing duo of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick who between the also wrote Zombieland (2009), G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013), Deadpool (2016), Life (2017), Deadpool 2 (2018), 6 Underground (2019) and Zombieland: Double Tap (2019).

Spiderhead comes with an intriguingly interesting idea – it is a rare work of conceptual science-fiction (or at least technological development) – the idea that pharmaceuticals can be used to control or even outrightly fabricate emotional states. I was reminded of The Terminal Man (1974) and the scene where George Segal has an implant placed in his head that is able to switch emotions and memories on and off depending on which brain centre is activated.

Joseph Kosinski opens the film with a scene where a man is made to uncontrollably laugh and continues to do so as one of the watching scientists starts to describe issues of alarming sobriety such as the Ugandan genocide. There are other fascinating developments like where Miles Teller is placed in the room first with Tess Haubrich and then aging Angie Milliken and made to feel love and ends up banging both of them right there.

My disappointment with this scene is when Miles Teller is next placed in the room with hulking tattooed Nathan Jones and you keep expecting them to make him have sex with him too but the film backs away from that with Miles Teller doing the standard “I respect to you, but I don’t go there” line. The whole point of the experiments is in making people go exactly where they don’t want to go. How much more effective would the drug be proven if it made someone fall in love with a person of a gender they weren’t attracted to? It almost feels like the film is being too conservative in this era where genderfluid, non-binary sexuality dominates. The other issue is in that Miles Teller is shown developing an attraction to Jurnee Smollett, we never see how he reconciles or feels bad about being made to feel an attraction to two other women during this period.

Chris Hemsworth as Steve Abnesti in Spiderhead (2022)
Chris Hemsworth as the morally ambiguous scientist Steve Abnesti

The film gets to an interesting place where Chris Hemsworth keeps pushing Miles Teller to choose which of the women he had instant love for to subject to a dose of the Darkenfloxx, which will cause them to experience intense fear – only for Tess Haubrich to be chosen and administered the Darkenfloxx whereupon she is driven to a state of extreme fear, so much so that she smashes a lamp and then slits her throat, as all the while Teller is forced to sit there and coolly, calmly describe what he is seeing.

The fascination of the film is in watching its two leads play out. Miles Teller has becoming an increasingly underrated actor – I was watching Spiderhead at the same time as the tv mini-series The Offer (2022) where I was considerably impressed with the charismatic assurance he displayed in the lead. Chris Hemsworth is known to the world as Thor. Here he plays subtly against type, cast as the handsomely assured scientist. He projects such a handsome charisma that it is some way into the film before you start to realise that he has started to increasingly travel across a heck of a lot ethical boundaries and is actually the bad guy.

Joseph Kosinski lets all of this play out in cool, neutral lighting schemes. And it is fascinating watching the handsomely assured Chris Hemsworth up against the easygoing Miles Teller and watch the script contort through its moral conundrums. Where the film starts to let his fall down is in the need for a traditional heroic ending where it needs to pit Hemsworth and Teller against one another in fisticuffs and have Teller and Jurnee Smollett racing to escape the facility as Hemsworth turns all the prisoners against them, just as the authorities close in to make an arrest. We go from a cool and fascinating conceptual SF film to one that feels it needs to wheel out the action movie clichés to wind the show up.


Trailer here


Director:
Actors: , , , , , , , , , ,
Category:
Themes: , , , , ,