George Saunders’ short story, "Escape from Spiderhead", which was originally published in the New Yorker, is about the ethics and perils of messing with human emotions. And in George Saunders' territory, that terrifying promise of a chilling futuristic tragedy becomes black comedy.
Netflix’s screen adaptation of the story, Spiderhead, is vastly different from its source. The man at the helm of the project is Joseph Kosinski, riding high on the wild success of Top Gun: Maverick. As a director, Kosinski is known for his ability to combine visual effects with human drama highly effectively. Here, the tone is understated until the last half hour of the film, the third act, when it turns into action thriller territory, derailing the dramatic core of the story, which essentially takes place within the minds of its characters.
Chris Hemsworth, also the film’s co-producer, plays the lead role of sociopath Steve Abnesti, a man who runs a rehabilitation centre called Spiderhead for clinical trials of motion-altering drugs. His guinea pigs, such as Jeff (Miles Teller) and Rachel (Jurnee Smollett), among others, agree to be confined in the futuristic facility where everyone is expected to be cordial with one another.
The drugs injected through an individualised remote-controlled device through a port attached to each subject’s spine, have tongue-in-cheek designer-pharmaceutical-sounding names, like Luvactin and Darkenflox. The drugs manipulate human emotions and behaviour: love, fear, honesty and obedience, language, libido. Before Abnesti can dose his subjects with these mood-changing substances, they must verbally say the word “acknowledge”. Abnesti bullies and cajoles his subjects into totally inappropriate situations.
Hemsworth is woefully inadequate for the role. The intended comedy is supposed to come from Abnesti’s callousness. Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick add another dimension to Hemsworth’s greed and the need to control by lending a childhood trauma to the character, explaining why he is the man he is. Hemsworth is ominous and evil one moment and helpless and out of control the next.
The acting force is Teller, who effectively channels the fear, anxiety, goodness and guilt of man with a past for which he has not forgiven himself—often in one scene. There’s a scene in which Jeff and Steve, dosed up on a drug that induces laughter, almost have moments of bonding with each other. When Jeff finds out the true intentions of Abnesti through a misplaced key—the moment the film jarringly moves into the thriller realm—he has to find a way to escape with Rachel, who has a past she believes she has no redemption from, but who Jeff falls in love with. But first, he has to find a way to expose Abnesti.
The scenes leading to the climax derail the stark atmospherics and restraint that build up the chilling terror of the story’s premise. Is it a thriller, a moral tale about a futuristic pharmaceutical company destroying all that’s spontaneous about human behaviour, or a post-Viagra retelling of Brave New World? Kosinski and his crew are all too confused.
Spiderhead dropped on Netflix on June 17, 2022.
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