Spiderhead Review: A Wild and Crazy Streak

Nick Clement brings us his Spiderhead review, a movie that is currently available to stream on Netflix. 

Two inmates form a connection while grappling with their pasts in a state-of-the-art penitentiary run by a brilliant visionary who experiments on his subjects with mind-altering drugs.

A trio of fully committed performances from my-main-man Miles Teller, Jurnee Smollett, and Chris Hemsworth, and Joseph Koskinski’s as-always-stylish direction can’t fully rescue a half-in, half-out script from Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick that didn’t delve deep enough into the dark subject matter being explored.

Based on a short story by George Saunders that appeared in The New Yorker, and heavily reminiscent of both the fabulous Amazon Prime series Homecoming and Alex Garland’s cult-fave feature Ex-Machina, this psychological thriller mixes tones (which I always appreciate) and has some mean and devious fun for a time being, before opting for a more standard finish.

This is a tough film to fully discuss without wading into potential spoilers, but we’ve seen this set up before, where prisoners are given a chance at reduced sentences if they allow themselves to be tested upon by scientists, and I wish that the characters hadn’t been made into fully (or somewhat) sympathetic creations.

Kosiniski and ace cinematographer Claudio Miranda have such a pristine sense of visual composition that, while viewing, it’s easy to glide over some of the story beats that would have been more interesting had they been given a truly menacing edge, but I give this Netflix programmer more credit than most, as it’s definitely got a wild and crazy streak running through its veins, and it was cool to see Kosinski switch gears after the breathtaking blockbusting of Top Gun: Maverick. He just needed a bit sharper of a script.

Spiderhead review by Nick Clement