Review: Spiderhead (2022)

What is consent? What is free will? These are the sorts of questions posed but never truly explored by Joseph Kosinski’s Spiderhead, a Netflix thriller based on a short story by Man Booker Prize-winning author, George Saunders. Slickly shot and performed, but relatively slight in terms of narrative and thematics, Spiderhead never wades too deeply into the implications of its conception, which is intriguing, nevertheless.

The film stars Miles Teller as Jeff, an inmate at an experimental prison known as Spiderhead, where prisoners are allowed many freedoms and privileges so long as they consent to being guinea pigs for chemical experiments by program director Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth in high-energy weirdo mode). Steve’s drugs, which go by goofy product names such as Laffodil, Verbaluce, and Luvactin, modify human behaviour. Laffodil makes you find everything funny. Verbaluce makes you talk without hesitation. Luvactin makes you extremely amorous. And so on.

In the film’s cold open, we watch Steve and his chemist assistant, Mark (Mark Paguio), test Laffodil on a subject. The man laughs at bad puns before Steve and Mark start relaying horrifying facts, such as the fact that at least 800,000 people died in the Rwandan genocide. It doesn’t matter what they say; the man laughs and laughs. Steve smiles. His miracle drug works. But for what purpose?

Kosinski and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (best known for writing the Deadpool films) play coy with Steve’s intentions. He’s presented as confident, weirdly chipper, a bit slippery, but ultimately mostly benevolent. He speaks about improving the world and is unfailingly peppy and energetic, but there’s not much substance to anything he says. You can’t pin him down. But that doesn’t matter so much because he’s offering nice things and is so handsome and friendly.

Jeff and the others, including Jurnee Smollett’s Lizzy, get a weird feeling from Steve, but they never question him. They may suspect that underneath all the smiles and jokes and prisoner freedoms, such as gourmet snacks, roomy minimalist decor, and lack of guard supervision, he’s using them for his own ends. It’s too easy to say yes—or “Acknowledge,” which is what inmates must say to verbally consent to the use of chemicals in the film—when you can offload the moral obligation of your actions to another person and reap the rewards of easier material conditions. It’s only when bad things happen in a trial involving Jeff that the inmates start to question just how far they’re willing to go. 

Spiderhead never dips further than a few inches beneath the surface in terms of exploring its existential questions. It’s content to bask in surface pleasures, most notably Chris Hemsworth’s wacky performance. Hemsworth plays Steve as a blend between a cycle fitness instructor and a tech billionaire. He’s handsome and ripped (he’s played by Hemsworth, so duh), wears eccentrically stylish outfits, and is constantly goofing around, even as he puts people through the ringer in his trials. We watch Hemsworth dance to needle-drops and never stop smiling and coaxing his co-stars into compliance with laughs and jokes and friendly pats on the back. Hemsworth is a major Hollywood star who has increasingly leaned on his comedic abilities as a leading man. So we should count Spiderhead as another development in his growth into Hollywood’s lovably goofy, leading hunk, with a wrinkle of danger beneath the smiles this time round.

But is Hemsworth’s performance substantive? Not really, but that’s not his fault. Like Teller and Smollett, he’s given barebones character elements. At least he’s allowed to be eccentric, while Teller and Smollett are more conventionally tragic, dupes for Hemsworth’s weirdo mastermind. It’s a flashy performance, but not one that’ll garner any awards attention (not that Hemsworth seems to be chasing such things).

He’s slick. And so is the film. Kosinski is a talented visual director (as demonstrated by Tron: Legacy, Oblivion, and most recently Top Gun: Maverick). His camera plays with the minimalist lines of the prison, which is located underground on a picturesque island. He has beautiful establishing shots race over the waters—establishing shots seem a rarity these days—and uses shadows and depth to entrap the characters in the frame. There’s colour and compelling lighting and a cinematic palette—an actual sheen (as LexG would say).

But Kosinski needs others to deliver the character goods, as he’s more a technical director than an actor’s director. Reese and Wernick can provide some chuckles, but they shrug off any attempt to do more than amuse and entertain. Even at 107 minutes, the story seems stretched thin. It’s no surprise it’s based on a short story, but I can only assume the story had a bit more substance in its writing. Perhaps not.

As far as streaming content goes, Spiderhead isn’t bad. It’s engaging and fun to look at. Hemsworth is memorable. But for a film that asks such intriguing questions, it has no real interest in the answers.

5 out of 10

Spiderhead (2022, USA)

Directed by Joseph Kosinski; written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, based on “Escape From Spiderhead” by George Saunders; starring Chris Hemsworth, Miles Teller, Jurnee Smollett, Mark Verlaine, Tess Haubrich, Angie Millikan.

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