Chris Hemsworth's Spiderhead never crawls out of its own predictability

Miles Teller doesn’t have to work very hard to sell us his character’s tragic backstory. The scars on his face have always paved the way for him to play vulnerable characters. Whether it’s him drowning his Daddy issues with stiff drinks in teen-romance The Spectacular Now (2013), or as a tortured upstart jazz drummer skirting the lines of crazy/genius trying to impress his sadistic teacher in Whiplash (2015). Even in his last theatrical release Top Gun: Maverick (2022), Teller wears the face of someone nursing his traumas from the past (his father’s death and a betrayal from his father’s best friend). It’s a face you instantly recognise in Joseph Kosinski’s Spiderhead (2022), where Teller plays the part of an inmate participating in clinical trials for pharmaceuticals being developed on a remote island. If you’ve seen enough movies, you know it means trouble.

Chris Hemsworth ’s sunny smile and relaxed demeanour while administering the drugs into the inmates is fooling no one. “Drip on?” Hemsworth asks a man, who responds with ‘Acknowledge’ and then begins to laugh hysterically because of the drug. We know how these films eventually turn out, don’t we?

Which is why for a better part of the first half-hour, Kosinski’s film conceals its cards, to appear ‘cerebral’. As the latter hour reveals, it’s not as smart as it thinks it is. In fact, it is not smart at all.

The Spiderhead, a facility where inmates are given their own rooms, looks like a Bond villain’s lair from the outside and has the interiors of a newly-funded tech start-up. The kind with bean bags in many corners, where everyone is told to ‘work hard, party harder’, and also where the ‘boss’ walks around in t-shirts and flip-flops and insists on being on a first-name basis with all his employees. Of course, this is until they feel the need to establish the hierarchy for the tiniest of reasons. Anyone who has worked in a set-up like this, already knows how the ‘liberal culture’ is a facade. One that is inevitably going to be found out.

It’s quite similar inside the Spiderhead facility, where the inmates are treated with respect and candour. Hemsworth’s character, Steve Abnesti, is always polite and smiling when he’s asking his inmates for permission to administer drugs into them. He wants to get done with formality as soon as he can, and yet appear as earnest as possible each time. Hemsworth is a distractingly good-looking actor, who doesn’t go to the lengths of a Christian Bale or a Jared Leto to become unrecognisable in a role. Which is why, despite Hemsworth’s best efforts, Steve Abnesti never really becomes a character on his own. One sees him smiling at his subjects, and they see Chris Hemsworth donning a pair of glasses to ‘act’ like Steve Abnesti.

On the contrary, Miles Teller looks like ‘Jeff’ from the first scene. The haunted visions from his past look like ‘truth’, and yet they’re also inseparable from most of Tellers’ performances in the past decade. This works both ways: as he makes his part look almost effortless, and yet, he never quite breaks new ground in what seems ripe for an ‘actorly’ part.

Abnesti is a pharmaceutical CEO (and inventor) of drugs that can induce certain emotions in people. The doors within Spiderhead remain unlocked, everyone is given the illusion of ‘free will’ within the facility even though they lead very regimented lives. The janitorial, kitchen and cleaning responsibilities are neatly divided among inmates. They’re even given the illusion of having a say in matters, like most subjects in these experiments. They’re repeatedly told they can back out from the experiment. And yet, when someone actually tries to do it, Abnesti manipulates them into participating. The trick, after all, is to study the subject’s behaviour as more and more obstacles are imposed into the mind of the subject.

Adapted from a George Saunders’ short story that appeared in the New Yorker magazine in 2010, one can’t help but draw parallels with Silicon Valley’s Big Tech that still didn’t have the kind of influence then, the one it has a decade later. “I want to make this world a better place,” Abnesti keeps telling his colleague, Mark (Mark Paguio), almost as if to remind him of the promised land that inventors like him are destined for, even if it passes through some less than righteous alleys. It’s a line we’ve often also heard from the CEOs of tech giants like Facebook and Twitter during senate hearings, where they’ve been summoned to account for the manner in which their platforms are influencing elections across the planet.

As a film that’s primarily about people chatting and observing human behaviour, Spiderhead is too caught up in its own ‘shocking reveals’ (which aren’t shocking if you’ve watched movies in your life), its industrial and neatly-pressed interiors, and good-looking leads. Kosinski’s film doesn’t have the slow-burn suspense of the first season of Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg’s Homecoming (2019), starring Julia Roberts in a superbly calibrated performance. Hemsworth is a lightweight in comparison, and Kosinski is too style-over-substance (something that worked splendidly for the Top Gun sequel, given the universe). Here Kosinski’s limitations as a director, are for everyone to see.  

Spiderhead is streaming on Netflix

Tatsam Mukherjee has been working as a film journalist since 2016. He is based out of Delhi NCR.

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