Spiderhead
Experimental institutions are invariably sinister places in the cinema, but the horrors in Joseph Kosinski’s sci-fi thriller feel a little too pre-packaged.
Love is the drug: Jurnee Smollett and Miles Teller
As if we were not already malleable enough! Truth be told, Joseph Kosinski’s new film does feel strangely old school in its revelations. George Saunders’ short story ‘Escape from Spiderhead’ was published in The New Yorker twelve years ago and since then the Internet’s algorithmic foot soldiers have been manipulating our preferences for good or bad (mostly bad). Yet long before the bots arrived there was the legerdemain of the supermarket aisle and the covert fragrances hard-wired into the products that we had no idea we needed to buy. Now there’s Chris Hemsworth’s super-fit, duplicitously charismatic Übermensch who has a big plan on his hands.
We are in the near future and the eponymous promontory is home to the state-of-the-art Spiderhead Penitentiary and Research Center. It is here that prisoners have volunteered their services to help facilitate a drug trial, the unknown potions administered during a seemingly innocuous series of interviews. The opening segment shows Ray, an inmate (Stephen Tongun), reacting to a series of awful jokes read by Chris Hemsworth over a tannoy (“What did the fisherman say to the magician? Pic a cod, any cod.”) and dissolving into insane giggles. Each inmate is fitted with a dorsal ‘MobiPak’ which administers a particular drug into the bloodstream at the touch of a button, drugs with such generic tags as laffodil, luvactin, obediex, phobica and the devil in the pack, darkenfloxx.
To some it may seem like a cop-out of the inmates’ prescribed punishment, as they are free to interact with each other, have their own bedrooms, enjoy simple luxuries and share a carefree camaraderie with the prison staff. An open-plan, open-door facility with yellow walls and furniture (and pink muzak), it is only this side of the unnerving, although some might appreciate its anodyne effects. Meanwhile, Chris Hemsworth acts like God and utters bromides like “we’re changing the world” and “drugs like this prevent places like this.”
The film dabbles with intriguing moral dilemmas – are we the sum of the worst thing that we have ever done? – but never really develops them. Internees Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett) and Jeff (Miles Teller) have done terrible things, but are nonetheless consumed by remorse. Hemsworth’s Steve Abnesti on the other hand finds it funny when his puppets dance to the tunes that he sets them. Tall, handsome and clean-cut, he feels like the wrong man for the job. But maybe that’s the point. Even so, the film’s modus operandi seems all too familiar and schematic. It’s clever and at times even provocative but it misses a human touch that might have drawn the viewer in deeper. The outcome is pre-ordained, the hard edges blurred. There is one moment of terrifying irony, but it is brushed aside in the interests of formula. Stanley Kubrick would have let it lie and allowed his subjects – us – to duly suffer.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Miles Teller, Jurnee Smollett, Mark Paguio, Tess Haubrich, Angie Milliken, Stephen Tongun, Nathan Jones, BeBe Bettencourt, Joey Vieira.
Dir Joseph Kosinski, Pro Eric Newman, Chris Hemsworth, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Agnes Chu, Geneva Wasserman, Tommy Harper and Jeremy Steckler, Screenplay Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, from the short story ‘Escape From Spiderhead’ by George Saunders, Ph Claudio Miranda, Pro Des Jeremy Hindle, Ed Stephen Mirrione, Music Joseph Trapanese, Costumes Amelia Gebler, Sound Ren Klyce, Dialect coach Tim Monich.
Grand Electric/The New Yorker Studios-Netflix.
105 mins. USA. 2022. UK and US Rel: 17 June 2022. Cert. 15.
