The peculiarly titled Spiderhead arrives on Netflix with about as little fanfare as a film starring an Avenger, written by the duo behind Deadpool, and directed by the man behind the summer’s most beloved blockbuster could possibly garner. This seems even more surprising upon watching the opening minutes, in which Joseph Kosinski draws on his Top Gun: Maverick box of tricks to deploy striking shots of a Cessna voyaging through azure skies (co-lead Miles Teller is another Maverick link). But once that seaplane parks, it’s clear that this is a very different proposition to that high-altitude, fist-pumping action flick. A claustrophobic, headfucky thriller about mysterious experiments, Spiderhead is set almost entirely in just two rooms. No need for speed here — but while it’s admirable that Kosinski and his cast are trying something new, this experiment is only partially successful.
The source material is a New Yorker short story, Escape From Spiderhead, a chilly sliver of science-fiction by George Saunders. In it, Saunders paints an Orwellian picture of prisoners experimented on by an amiable but dark-intentioned warden: activating drugs via remote control, he can manipulate their emotions and even their thoughts. In expanding the tale into a feature film, Kosinski has had fun creating a chicly nightmarish penitentiary, all sleek surfaces, communal coffee pots and rooms with hellish secrets (in case you’re wondering why it’s called Spiderhead, well, the building has eight wings, with the nerve-centre being the top one). While it’s hardly a visual feast, there are smart little design flourishes, like the colour-coded vials that click into Apple-esque ‘MobiPaks’ on the patients’ backs.
The main event is Chris Hemsworth going full mad scientist.
Cast-wise, while Teller delivers a solid performance as the prisoner at the heart of the story (there are so many flashbacks to the car accident that saw him incarcerated that it starts to feel like padding), the main event is Chris Hemsworth going full mad scientist. Having almost as much fun as Oscar Isaac did in Ex Machina, and even getting a similar dance routine, Hemsworth is the most immaculately groomed Bond villain ever, a bespectacled pharmaceutical bro who says things like, “Pressure forms diamonds,” when he’s not performing heinous experiments on his captives. While he’s fun, the character never musters up much menace, an issue given that this is positioned as a taut two-hander. As Spiderhead’s chief arachnid, he’s a bit of a let-down.
It’s refreshing to get a sci-fi film that dials down the ‘fi’ while going big on the ‘sci’. There’s almost no action here (when some does arrive in the third act, it feels extraneous), with Kosinski trusting in his small ensemble of actors to deliver thrills with their jargon-heavy dialogue alone. That tactic mostly comes off — fans of Black Mirror will likely enjoy the snaky, jet-black plot. That said, how much you’re entertained by it may be in direct proportion to your tolerance for hearing Chris Hemsworth say the word ‘Darkenfloxx’ — it has to be in the double-digits, at least.