‘Spiderhead’ Review: Prisoners of the Mind
Movies|‘Spiderhead’ Review: Prisoners of the Mind
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/movies/spiderhead-review.html
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This latest Joseph Kosinski film — set in a penitentiary that dispenses aphrodisiacs and fear-inducers — couldn’t be more unlike his “Top Gun: Maverick.”
Chris Hemsworth, the mastermind in ”Spiderhead.”Credit…Netflix
- Spiderhead
- Directed by Joseph Kosinski
- Action, Crime, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller
- R
- 1h 46m
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With “Spiderhead,” the director Joseph Kosinski returns to screens in what feels like record time, given that his pandemic-delayed “Top Gun: Maverick” opened in theaters just three weeks ago. If that sequel aimed to short-circuit viewers’ higher functions by appealing to nostalgia and working the adrenal glands, the newer movie is a smaller-scale, principally interior production, shot under Covid restrictions, that aims to ponder the deep secrets of the human mind.
As if to brace audiences for serious viewing, the film even opens with a logo for The New Yorker, following one for Netflix; it’s based on a short story by George Saunders that the magazine published in 2010. In the movie version, Spiderhead is the name of a penitentiary and research center where prisoners serve as test subjects for psychotropic drugs. These meds, dispensed from packs installed at the base of the spine, serve all sorts of purposes. They can turbocharge libidos, make air pollution look like rainbow-ringed clouds or inspire terror at the sight of a stapler.
The head of research, Steve Abnesti, is played by Chris Hemsworth, who glides around the Bond-villain-lair sets in aviator glasses. He delivers smarmy lectures on improving the world and berates his assistant, Mark (Mark Paguio), for not freshening the coffee. Together, the scientists bogart most of what’s enjoyable in “Spiderhead,” with Hemsworth gleefully playing up his character’s nonchalance over his unsound experiments and ethical lapses. “The time to worry about crossing lines was a lot of lines ago,” Steve tells Mark with a wave of the hands.
It’s not that Jeff (Miles Teller), the protagonist, who broods over the car wreck that put him in prison, and his love interest, Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett) — an addition from the short story — are entirely boring. But Kosinski’s specialty is tangible action sequences, with planes and explosions, not people who agonize over guilt and punishment. While you can admire Kosinski’s efforts to make a brainy blockbuster, the script (by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick) is better suited to the cerebral tendencies of a David Cronenberg or a Steven Soderbergh, rather than a filmmaker apparently set on wresting a crowd-pleaser from dark material.
Kosinski does what he can to keep this production, shot in Australia, fast and loose. The room where Jeff and other inmates are observed after dosing wittily resembles a talk show set, with yellow easy chairs. The prison, located on a remote island, is an asymmetrical, almost gravity-defying slab of Brutalist weirdness. The soundtrack is filled with 1970s and ’80s earworms, as if Spiderhead were Studio 54.
But Kosinski can’t make the inane philosophizing about free will sound profound or new, and the hectic, hasty finale, lacking the nerve or chilly interiority of the original story, plays like something that blew up in the lab.
Spiderhead
Rated R for an experimental (but quite effective) aphrodisiac drug. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
Spiderhead
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When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
- Director
- Joseph Kosinski
- Writers
- Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
- Stars
- Miles Teller, Chris Hemsworth, Charles Parnell, Jurnee Smollett, Tess Haubrich
- Rating
- R
- Running Time
- 1h 46m
- Genres
- Action, Crime, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller
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A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Experimenting With Free Will and the Cerebral. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
‘Spiderhead’ Review: A New Low for Netflix
There is only one way to escape from Spiderhead in sly postmodern scamp George Saunders’ all-but-unfilmable short story “Escape From Spiderhead,” and it rhymes with skip-to-my-lou-icide. Unlike print fiction, where pretty much anything goes, movies that feature acts of self-harm must be very careful, since audiences have been known to emulate those same acts. Right up front, Netflix warns viewers of its woefully wrongheaded adaptation that the movie features such behavior. But if Netflix really cared about our well-being, why release a film so bad, we’d do practically anything to escape from “Spiderhead” ourselves?
No one would blame you for sampling it in the first place. Saunders is a wickedly funny author with more major writing prizes than Meryl Streep has Oscars. The tricky source material was translated by “Deadpool” duo Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who understand how to walk the line between outrageous and offensive, and then given to “Top Gun: Maverick” helmer Joseph Kosinski, who doesn’t. The Netflix logo may give you pause, but it also bears the imprimatur of The New Yorker Studios. Plus, it stars Chris Hemsworth, Miles Teller and a guy with tattoos covering half his body (Nathan Jones), big enough to eat the both of them.
Ta-dum! So you gave in and clicked Play, and right away something feels off. If you’re familiar with the short story, everything feels off. But for the vast majority of people — who don’t even bother to read the Netflix plot capsules, much less short stories that run in The New Yorker — “Spiderhead” the movie will be the first and only encounter they have with Saunders’ dark and practically deranged premise.
“Spiderhead” the movie takes place in a futuristic research facility, i.e., Spiderhead, where prisoners of serious crimes are offered an alternative to hard time: They can take part in a series of drug tests conducted by a sociopath named Steve Abnesti (Hemsworth). The drugs in question have tongue-in-cheek designer-pharmaceutical-sounding names, like Luvactin and Darkenfloxx, garnished with cutesy ™ symbols. Said trials use chemicals to manipulate human emotions and behavior: love and fear, honesty and obedience. Verbaluce stimulates one’s language centers. Vivistif works like Viagra.
Before Abnesti can dose his subjects with these mood-changing substances, they must verbally say the word “acknowledge.” But the real manipulator here is Abnesti, who bullies and cajoles his subjects into totally inappropriate situations. Situations like these — i.e., using Luvactin to make two disinterested parties jump each other’s bones, repeating the same test with various parties, then forcing one subject to choose which of his mates receives a potentially lethal dose of Darkenfloxx — are very hard to make funny when performed by real people.
Even if there were, Hemsworth is not the right actor for this role. Sure, we’ve seen him be funny before (playing the airhead assistant in “Ghostbusters,” for example), but the comedy here is supposed to come from how unbelievably callous this man is — that and the wildly unprofessional parameters of his experiments, which cross pretty much every ethical line imaginable. So it’s not enough for Hemsworth to pose and look cute, delivering in-on-the-joke lines like “Beautiful people get away with too much. I say that having benefited a few times myself.” Because there is no joke to be in on.
Reese and Wernick don’t get it. They think it’s featuring the song “She Blinded Me With Science” during experiments.
Kosinski doesn’t get it. He thinks it’s directing two Luvactin-pumped subjects to go at each other like a pair of oversexed Tex Avery cartoons, while the Swingle Sisters caterwaul alongside.
The actors don’t get it. They’ve been trained to find the reality in their roles, but Saunders’ sense of humor is pitched at such an unbelievable extreme, it would have been wiser to go full Peter Sellers with their performances.
Tonally, there’s no easy way to play Abnesti or his human guinea pigs, each of whom has been locked away for some truly heinous act — like infanticide, murder or licensing the rights for a George Saunders story to Netflix. All except Jeff (Teller), whose crime was its own punishment. Jeff drank and drove his car into a tree, killing his best friend. Kosinski shows the accident in a flashback, so overwrought with visual effects, it looks like a scene Baz Luhrmann left out of “The Great Gatsby.”
There’s a reason Kosinski and company decided to make Jeff more sympathetic than he was in the short story. In the short story, Jeff smashed his friend’s head in with a rock. But the film team is focused on that escape-from-Spiderhead idea. And they don’t think suicide would make for a happy ending.
In the movie, Spiderhead is a chic concrete bunker on a remote tropical island reached only by biplane. The architect clearly watched a few James Bond movies. But what that has to do with Saunders’ story is anybody’s guess.
Surely someone must have read the source material and realized the movie would be going in a very different direction. What direction would that be? Imagine the Michael Bay version of “Flowers for Algernon. ” Or the Stanley Milgram study reinvented as an action movie, complete with badly staged fistfights and low-budget explosions.
Saunders’ story is amusing. Not his best, but certainly up to snuff with the other fiction that appears in The New Yorker. Amid the laughs, which are designed to make readers uncomfortable, Saunders aspires to better understand what drives certain human behavior. Could you make a drug that causes subjects to be happy or horny, submissive or depressed, with no lingering effects of that emotion? How is that different from what our bodies experience as love or pain?
But the instant you ask a group of actors to play the same scenario, it all falls apart. Kosinski is a gifted director, but his specialty is juggling human elements with complex visual effects. He is not cut out for this kind of comedy. His design choices are all wrong. The execution is tone deaf. And even Oscar-winning editor Stephen Mirrione can’t salvage it (he couldn’t rescue Charlie Kaufman/George Clooney’s “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” either).