Spare a thought for America’s pharmacologists. Having seen one of their own unleash an inadvertent monkey apocalypse in 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the country’s drug researchers have since been villainized in projects as tonally disparate as Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects (2013) and the Charlize Theron battle royale The Old Guard (2020). Not helping matters has been 20-plus years of guilt by association with the Purdue Sacklers, the OxyContin billionaires at the heart of Hulu’s Dopesick (2021) and the forthcoming Netflix miniseries Painkiller. Alas for Big Pharma types the nation over, Netflix’s new film Spiderhead is unlikely to move the needle in the other direction.
Based on a New Yorker short story by George Saunders, Spiderhead stars Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller as participants in an increasingly menacing game of pharmaceutical bingo. Hemsworth plays Steve Abnesti, an experimental chemist whose goal is nothing less than the total elimination of emotional instability. Teller, meanwhile, is Jeff, a convicted felon who — Department of Corrections regulators having apparently fallen down on the job — has enrolled in Abnesti’s live-in drug trial as an alternative to a stint in the big house. Joining Jeff on Abnesti’s private island are various other men and women in similar straits. Though these indentured test subjects may theoretically reject any one of the scientist’s offerings, the price of refusal may well be a ticket back to the clink.
This threat, looming over Jeff and his fellows like a drawn blade, does much to explain the willingness with which Spiderhead’s human guinea pigs imbibe Abnesti’s concoctions. Administered via what appear to be surgically implanted fanny packs, the chemist’s creations include such mind-alterers as “Verbaluce” and “Darkenfloxx,” a speech disinhibitor and torturer’s brew, respectively. As the viewer will immediately guess, Abnesti is, like many a cinematic scientist before him, completely insane. Yet credit where credit is due. The man may be a certifiable nut job, but he knows how to name a product.
Much of Spiderhead’s fun lies in the contemplation of Abnesti’s less damaging formulas, a collection of drugs that, while plainly menacing, are at least tinctured with pleasure. As the film opens, a participant has just received a dram of “Laffodil,” which prompts unrestrained hilarity at both dad jokes and references to the Rwandan genocide. Later, Abnesti doses a subject with “Luvactin” to spur a near-mystical response to a belching smokestack. Following the lead of its source material, the movie soon introduces the latter compound into social situations. The results, tragicomic vignettes in which patients act on chemically induced, and temporary, desires, are both amusing and horrifying. Surely our own sexual appetites are not so easily manipulated.
Indeed, it is in part this very anxiety that lends such pathos to Spiderhead’s single authentic romance. Among Jeff’s island companions is a beautiful young woman named Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett), with whom he shares a casual but sincere flirtation. Equally haunted by tragic histories, the pair split kitchen duties and gradually open up to one another about their criminal pasts. Though not present in Saunders’s short story, Lizzy plays a crucially significant role in the movie. A source of real, rather than engineered, emotion, she gives the lie to the distortions of Luvactin, etc. Just as importantly, she provides Jeff with the means of psychological resistance upon his being introduced to the full depth of Abnesti’s depravity.
While it would spoil things needlessly to reveal precisely what those depths are, suffice it to say that the misery-inducing compound Darkenfloxx features heavily. A deluded ubermensch in the style of Josef Mengele, Abnesti not only pits his subjects against one another but attempts to use their own affections as the raw material in his game. To the extent that it works, his “players” lose not only their autonomy but something of their humanity, too.
A remote lair, a scheming man of science, a certain minimalist aesthetic: Presumably, I was not the only Spiderhead viewer to be reminded of Ex Machina, the 2014 debut from filmmaker Alex Garland. Like Netflix’s new movie, Garland’s picture probed the recesses of free will in a world made strange by innovation. In both films, the drive to create butts up against the ethical norms that protect us from our most ruinous ambitions.
Sadly, and despite these pronounced similarities, Spiderhead is a mere fraction of the achievement that Ex Machina was. Preoccupied with the range of human feeling, it rejects subtlety and nuance in favor of a paint-by-numbers emotional palette. (“Be sad … now,” one can almost hear director Joseph Kosinski shouting.) A showcase for actors, it is as poorly cast as any production in recent memory. Though it pains me to say so, the hugely talented Teller is no small part of Spiderhead’s problem, bringing to the screen little of the inner fire that marked his work in Whiplash (2014) and Thank You for Your Service (2017). Smollett, too, is an odd choice, having come of age on TV’s Friday Night Lights but failing to outgrow the attendant teen-drama mannerisms.
By far the worst offender, however, is Hemsworth, who delivers what is certain to be one of the strangest, most self-indulgent, and least convincing performances of the year. Absurdly out of place in a laboratory, the Aussie heartthrob spends much of Spiderhead mugging for the camera, gracelessly telegraphing each sentiment the screenplay demands. Though Kosinski tries gamely to overcome our skepticism (for example, by giving Abnesti a New England Journal of Medicine to read on his exercise bike), the project is hopeless. Like Matthew Broderick as a Civil War hero (Glory), like Nicolas Cage as a knight (Season of the Witch), some casting missteps simply cannot be overcome.
It is possible, of course, that Saunders’s short story could have made a good movie, so provocative is its sci-fi conceit. Nevertheless, reader, believe me: This is not that film.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
