Spiderhead movie review: More lows than highs in pharmaceutical thriller from Top Gun: Maverick director

Language: English

In the dispiriting vision of our near-future in Spiderhead, prisoners are exploited as guinea pigs by a pharmaceutical company testing mood-altering drugs. These drugs have names — Verbaluce, Lafodill, Luvactin, Phobica and Darkenfloxx — that sound like they could be sold at an Ikea once the world reaches peak dystopia. The names are self-explanatory. A prisoner pumped with Verbaluce enjoys improved linguistic abilities. Luvactin turns two strangers into instant lovers. Lafodill will have you laughing at bad puns and even genocide. Darkenfloxx — let’s just say you don’t want that in your bloodstream. What do the prisoners get in exchange? The chance to spend commuted sentences in a cosier prison where they get to play arcade games, eat good food, and live under minimum security protocols. But at what cost? For how do you separate genuine emotions from the engineered? How do you escape from the enforced hallucination and state-sanctioned exploitation with your humanity intact?

With Top Gun: Maverick still cruising at the global box office, director Joseph Kosinski sets course for a second hit with a much smaller dystopian thriller he shot during the pandemic. Only, he can’t quite make it two for two, as his straight-to-Netflix release tailspins after an exciting launch and crashes into the danger zone where sci-fi’s nifty ideas go to die. If the Tom Cruise vehicle soars throughout, this Chris Hemsworth vehicle is not even sporadically exciting.

Spiderhead combines the Stanford prison experiment, the Ludovico technique and MKUltra into a nightmarish mash-up. The ideas of behavioural programming and the juxtaposition of individual liberty vs social order may bring to mind Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. But Spiderhead is actually the brainchild of George Saunders. The screenplay by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Zombieland, Deadpool) is an adaptation of a 2010 short story Saunders wrote for the New Yorker before it was included in the 2011 collection, Tenth of December. In a meta-moment, one of the prisoners can even be seen reading the very same book. While the movie is well-attuned to the sensorial facets of Saunders’ story, the cerebral edge is lost, reducing the high concept to little more than window dressing.

The film purports to be a parable about the importance of free will, a meditation on guilt and forgiveness, a semiotic inquiry into emotions, a cautionary tale about unethical experimentation, and a satire about biotech hubris. But these weighty and mighty intentions are buried in a tepid story that gradually disintegrates in a storm of twists and turns.

On a remote island, visionary scientist Steve Abnesti (Hemsworth) runs the futuristic research facility (that gives the movie its title) with his ambivalent assistant Mark (Mark Paguio). The Brutalist structure of the facility allows Kosinski to fall back on his Oblivion playbook and show off his architectural vision once again. The spacious rooms and mess hall act as a veneer for darker agendas — if Joseph Trapanese’s moody score by itself isn’t an indication.

What the experiments play on is the idea that every emotion, from love to fear to joy, are simply chemical reactions to external stimuli. So, each prisoner is surgically fitted with a device on their back which administers a cocktail of these mood catalysts straight into the spine. To give them the semblance of control, they are made to “acknowledge” consent. As the subjects cycle through the drugs, the film simulates the psychotropic effects to make the experience more palpable for the viewer. For instance, when Darkenfloxx induces a bad trip, the framing mirrors the subject’s anxiety.

The most willing subject of these experiments is Jeff (Miles Teller), a young man haunted by the trauma of a drunk driving accident. Signing up for the experiments, he foolishly believes, is some form of amends. Teller plays a man not just imprisoned within a penitentiary but also his own mind. As Jeff is unable to forgive himself, it also prevents him developing a relationship beyond flirting with fellow inmate Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett). But when he is pushed into making some tough moral choices and his affection for Lizzy is used against him, he comes to realise the sinister design at play.

As Abnesti, Hemsworth weaponises his disarming charms to villainous effect, using a warm smile and friendly banter to oblige the subjects into going along with his experiments, no matter how dangerous they get. One minute, he’s dancing without a care to Roxy Music’s “More Than This”; the next, he is making a punishment seem like a privilege to his test subjects. Abnesti is a man who has bought into the self-delusion that his inventions are going to change the world for the better. So, whatever atrocities he may commit in the short term he justifies by the good his methods will supposedly bring in the long term. When his methods are questioned, he will simply pretend like he is the powerless instrument of a much larger operation.

Despite all the movie’s flaws, Spiderhead is another telling audition reel for a director who is yet to deliver fully on his promise as a sci-fi filmmaker. The movie only proves what Tron: Legacy and Oblivion already did: that Kosinski sure knows how to mount a sci-fi movie on an aesthetic level. What he lacks is the acuity to get the narrative and thematics right. For in between all the drug trips and the wild tonal shifts, there are moments where you begin to wonder if you yourself might be the subject of some Netflix taste-cluster experiment.

Spiderhead is now streaming on Netflix

Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.

Read all the  Latest News _,_  Trending News _,_  Cricket News _,_  Bollywood News _,_  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook _,_  Twitter  and  Instagram _._