'Spiderhead' lays eggs that don't hatch
Netflix
Why can’t we feel anything authentic anymore? Why is everyone just medicating their way toward the simulation of experience?
If these questions seem stale, it’s because they are. Yet “Spiderhead,” adapted from George Saunders’ 2010 short story “Escape From Spiderhead,” seems to think that no one has ever considered the concept of people running from pain or a society that approaches mental health issues with force and conflict instead of support. If “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” took a spin around “Ex Machina” while “Her” played in the background, the result might be something like this experiment in mental and emotional alteration that likewise thinks it will blow your mind. It’s wrong.
Miles Teller, himself a survivor of a terrible car accident and someone who already played the perpetrator of a terrible car accident (“Rabbit Hole”) and the survivor of another one (“Whiplash”), plays Jeff, who is in prison because of his role in, yes, a terrible car accident. But he and many other inmates have considerable freedom as participants in a program led by Steve (Chris Hemsworth), who seems to be testing different compounds that he injects into the test subjects via packs attached to their backs, but only if someone agrees to the drip by saying “Acknowledge.” This study is voluntary, sort of, and at least in the dynamic between Steve and Jeff, somewhere on the edges of friendship.
The whole point, of course, has to do with whatever secrets are being kept from the people being studied, and the realities of what landed each person inside the facility in the first place. Hemsworth (one of the few highlights of Paul Feig’s disappointing “Ghostbusters” movie) again shows how good he can be when playing a character written as more than just “giant, very good-looking strong man,” and most stories having to do with regret and manipulation can strike a chord of anguished temptation, chasing relief from something that may feel no less fresh as time goes by.
But “Spiderhead,” directed by Joseph Kosinski (“Top Gun: Maverick”) from a script by the team behind the obnoxious “Deadpool” movies, takes a simplistic approach to complex ideas about what people can forgive about themselves and each other as it leans into discussions of falsified emotions and dosing that might have seemed trendy about 15-20 years ago. Perhaps Saunders’ story draws out more complexity from the way one mistake can derail a life and one ambitious entrepreneur can change a society and one unexpected relationship can throw everything else into question. On screen, “Spiderhead” struggles to mix moments of tragedy and lightness or land on a point that doesn’t make its view of the future of human emotional reckoning look a lot like the past.
C
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