Spiderhead (2022)

Score: 1.5 / 5

It took me longer than it should have to understand what was going on in this film. It's playing a very weird game from the outset. While science fiction thrillers work best by destabilizing our sense of context, forcing us to get on their weird wavelength right away, Spiderhead doesn't articulate itself very quickly. In some ways, the film treats us like its characters, trapped in a slightly trippy prison of ideas while being manipulated into a certain attitude. The story takes place in a strange futuristic prison where inmates are generally pretty free but the mysterious prison directors alter the prisoners' brain chemistry for research. They hope to be able to cure the world's problems with various medical enhancements and adjustments, and they use dubious scientist Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth) to do it all. 

Inmates have free will in this process -- it seems that saying "acknowledge" is their in-the-moment consent -- and apparently acquiescing can shorten their respective sentences. But it becomes pretty clear pretty soon that Abnesti is playing with fire. The drugs he chooses have intense effects: Laffodil provokes an overwhelming desire to laugh and Darkenfloxx induces extreme psychological pain, the latter resulting (at almost exactly the film's halfway point) in one inmate's graphic suicide. I point out the time of this revelation because the previous 45 minutes or so are almost unbearably dull. Half the movie goes by before we really understand a) the genre is thriller, b) the stakes of the situation, c) the quality (or lack) of the characters themselves. Those are all crucial to this story, and the film squanders them for too long, making everything after feel cheap.

I wondered a few times if I was being had. While I'm not familiar with the short story by George Saunders that inspires this film, it's clear that this film was desperate to stretch the material to a feature length. Screenwriters Rhett Rheese and Paul Wernick (Deadpool) try to imbue the proceedings with an off-beat sense of cold humor, and to some extent director Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick) tries to follow suit by featuring blaring oldies rock and slapping neon pink scrawl on the screen for the opening and closing credits. Even Hemsworth vacillates between playing the role as a fairly serious therapist who may genuinely care about his patients/prisoners and a somewhat campy mad scientist who gets off on watching paranoid and horny people suffering under his control. The problem is that the film takes so long to get us to this realization -- or appreciation -- and nothing before adds up to much.

I kept waiting for this film to take a Shutter Island kind of turn, to make a political or moral statement like The Stanford Prison Experiment, or even to pull a Stephen King and make a humanist story about overcoming odds like in The Shawshank Redemption or The Green Mile. But it never does; it routinely marches forward, hitting all the familiar beats, reaching an uninteresting and uninspired climax that felt as though the filmmakers hadn't seen any movies since the late '90s. In fact, the few moments of actual revelation are so poorly executed, I find myself wondering again if this movie plays itself dumb for some smart reason. At the aforementioned midway scene, Abnesti drops his office keys while running to try and help the suicide; inmate Jeff (Miles Teller), nominally the protagonist, slowly grabs them and opens his desk drawers for unclear reasons, suddenly discovering that Abnesti is fully in charge of the program and experiments, not a mysterious board or committee. 

Maybe I just don't care about sci-fi for the sake of sci-fi. But this movie couldn't even make any statements -- or, much more better, open possibilities for further consideration and conversation -- about the prison system or pharmaceutical corruption. It says nothing about incarcerated men trying to help or one-up each other, about the psychological strain of the imprisoned or real attempts to help. It just exists for no satisfying reason and can't even muster up the artistic gumption to make itself memorable or worthwhile. What a waste.