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Monday 13 June 2022

Spiderhead Review

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Spiderhead debuts on Netflix on June 17, 2022.

From director Joseph Kosinski, Spiderhead is a contained story with a unique tonal approach to familiar sci-fi ideas. It’s a tale of experimental, emotion-inducing drugs, and the inmates who sign up to be pharmaceutical guinea pigs, and it has a tactile quality — in line with Kosinski’s stellar Top Gun sequel — at least at first. While it eventually loses itself down a disappointingly conventional path, it remains intriguing for long enough to be a worthwhile watch.

Written by Deadpool scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, Spiderhead opens in a futuristic white room, where a man named Ray (Stephen Tongun) is told simple jokes and puns over a microphone from behind a two-way mirror. He chuckles, perhaps a little harder than you’d expect, but when the disembodied voices trade in their joke book for facts about genocide, Ray is overcome by fits of riotous laughter. This bizarre introduction, revealed to be an experiment for a laughter drug, brings us into the Spiderhead, a prison testing site on a lush, isolated island, where charismatic tech leader Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth) runs novel drug trials with his diligent assistant, Mark (Mark Paguio).

However, Spiderhead isn’t your average incarceration facility. It’s an upgrade of sorts, where convicted felons who signed up are transferred from gen-pop, and have the option of living in an open-door community (albeit one without much sunlight), with large rooms, common living spaces, and fully equipped kitchens. It looks more like a Norwegian prison than an American one, but what makes it unequivocally American is its unapologetically capitalist function. The prison’s incarcerated bodies are at the mercy of an anonymous, unseen corporate board, who use them to test various mood-altering substances. These drugs are inserted into their systems via compact cartridges permanently affixed to their lower backs, and controlled by an app on Steve’s smartphone. Where things get hazy is that no experiment can be run without the prisoners’ consent, but the film seems to ask, both loudly and early: how willing can their choices really be?

To make matters murkier, the prisoners’ day-to-day demeanors are mostly chipper. Jeff (Miles Teller) happily prepares hors d'oeuvres with Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett), whose flirtatious interactions imbue the film with a lively energy, matched by its upbeat editing and music choices. Steve, who’s seemingly at the mercy of higher powers himself, even mingles with Jeff and Lizzy; they all appear to be friends. The experiments Jeff partakes in mostly concern a drug that makes him see beauty in ugly surroundings, followed by another that makes him more verbose so he can better describe what he sees. He’s not entirely dissatisfied with his position, given the traditional alternative.

The unwavering focus on this premise, without stepping out of Jeff’s go-with-the-flow perspective, gives the film a particularly dissonant and unsettling quality when the experiments begin taking a sexual turn — what if that same beauty drug were applied to the way Jeff saw other people? — but its ethical concerns hover constantly in the margins, through glances that characters like Mark know better than to verbalize. The cool, calm, and collected Steve knows what he’s doing, and Mark is, for the most part, willing to follow him (so long as Jeff continues giving his consent). However, when the tests take a turn towards more difficult moral conundrums, involving a new aggression drug called “Darkenflox” — the name may be silly, but after a while its mere utterance conjures dread — the characters’ light and personable interactions begin to feel off-kilter, forcing Jeff to begin uncovering details of the experiments seemingly being kept secret.

There’s an almost tangible quality to the frame when it first introduces each drug — whether they induce laughter, fear, arousal, and so on — thanks to how Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda capture the prisoners’ points of view. Close ups of clouds and flowers are given a radiant, poetic quality when the inmates appreciate nature. Other prisoners take on a ravishing appearance in moments of mutual (but no doubt manipulated) attraction, and mundane objects seem enormous and imposing when the inmates are made to fear them. There’s an equally vivid quality to Jeff’s fleeting flashbacks, snippets which reveal the drunk driving incident that landed him in this predicament; these scenes take great advantage of Kosinski’s ability to translate momentum and adrenaline. Spiderhead may be poised for a Netflix release, but its limited theatrical run will no doubt yield a more sensory experience, given the film's rumbling, unnerving sound mix.

Despite a few too many conventional turns, it remains a worthwhile watch.

However, the further it goes on, the less it relies on these sensory flourishes to unpack its ethical dilemmas; they help establish the story’s initial parameters, but beyond a point, they aren’t used to actually tell it. While there’s a wonderful tension even (and especially) during scenes of stillness, as Steve’s welcoming persona begins to reveal ugly ulterior motives, Spiderhead’s quandaries are soon dramatized primarily as exchanges of dialogue, and as battles of wits, rather than explorations of human behavior, as it brushes up against discomforting moral questions about the nature of choices within the confines of capitalist society.

While the many twists and turns make for engaging viewing at first, they also get to a stage where the story becomes subsumed by explanation, in a manner that too easily resolves its burning questions. Eventually, revelations play more like flipped switches rather than gradual realizations, and emotional reckonings become external, rather than reflective — all en route to an action-heavy final act that can’t quite reconcile the story’s final, ill-conceived tonal swing.

The subjective approach in the first act makes for an enjoyable bait-and-switch, lulling you into a false sense of comfort before things begin flying off the rails. Teller and Smollett, charged with capturing lingering emotions and states of being slipping slowly out of their control, deliver livewire performances, while Hemsworth’s personable tech mogul proves to be a chilling send-up of modern Silicon Valley types, with his broad smiles and euphemistic language disguising ruthless intent, and a volatility that pairs well with the film’s unfurling narrative. Kosinski may not stick the landing with Spiderhead, but this year, he’s undoubtedly 2 for 2 when it comes to placing living, breathing characters in charged environments and forcing them to their limits.



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