‘Spiderhead’ Review: Prisoners of the Mind

Sep 04, 2023

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This latest Joseph Kosinski film — set in a penitentiary that dispenses aphrodisiacs and fear-inducers — couldn't be more unlike his "Top Gun: Maverick."

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By Ben Kenigsberg

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With "Spiderhead," the director Joseph Kosinski returns to screens in what feels like record time, given that his pandemic-delayed "Top Gun: Maverick" opened in theaters just three weeks ago. If that sequel aimed to short-circuit viewers’ higher functions by appealing to nostalgia and working the adrenal glands, the newer movie is a smaller-scale, principally interior production, shot under Covid restrictions, that aims to ponder the deep secrets of the human mind.

As if to brace audiences for serious viewing, the film even opens with a logo for The New Yorker, following one for Netflix; it's based on a short story by George Saunders that the magazine published in 2010. In the movie version, Spiderhead is the name of a penitentiary and research center where prisoners serve as test subjects for psychotropic drugs. These meds, dispensed from packs installed at the base of the spine, serve all sorts of purposes. They can turbocharge libidos, make air pollution look like rainbow-ringed clouds or inspire terror at the sight of a stapler.

The head of research, Steve Abnesti, is played by Chris Hemsworth, who glides around the Bond-villain-lair sets in aviator glasses. He delivers smarmy lectures on improving the world and berates his assistant, Mark (Mark Paguio), for not freshening the coffee. Together, the scientists bogart most of what's enjoyable in "Spiderhead," with Hemsworth gleefully playing up his character's nonchalance over his unsound experiments and ethical lapses. "The time to worry about crossing lines was a lot of lines ago," Steve tells Mark with a wave of the hands.

It's not that Jeff (Miles Teller), the protagonist, who broods over the car wreck that put him in prison, and his love interest, Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett) — an addition from the short story — are entirely boring. But Kosinski's specialty is tangible action sequences, with planes and explosions, not people who agonize over guilt and punishment. While you can admire Kosinski's efforts to make a brainy blockbuster, the script (by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick) is better suited to the cerebral tendencies of a David Cronenberg or a Steven Soderbergh, rather than a filmmaker apparently set on wresting a crowd-pleaser from dark material.

Kosinski does what he can to keep this production, shot in Australia, fast and loose. The room where Jeff and other inmates are observed after dosing wittily resembles a talk show set, with yellow easy chairs. The prison, located on a remote island, is an asymmetrical, almost gravity-defying slab of Brutalist weirdness. The soundtrack is filled with 1970s and ’80s earworms, as if Spiderhead were Studio 54.

But Kosinski can't make the inane philosophizing about free will sound profound or new, and the hectic, hasty finale, lacking the nerve or chilly interiority of the original story, plays like something that blew up in the lab.

SpiderheadRated R for an experimental (but quite effective) aphrodisiac drug. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

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