Spiderhead

Based on a short story in The New Yorker by George Saunders, the new film stars Chris Hemsworth as a prison warden testing behavior-altering drugs on ...

Saunders, who began writing for the magazine in 1992, was named a National Book Award finalist for “ Tenth of December,” the short-story collection in which “Escape from Spiderhead” was later published. “More and more these days,” Saunders told Deborah Treisman, The New Yorker’s fiction editor, when “Escape from Spiderhead” was first published, “what I find myself doing in my stories is making a representation of goodness and a representation of evil and then having those two run at each other full-speed. Shot in the country’s northeast during the pandemic, the film co-stars Miles Teller, who is currently appearing in theatres in “Top Gun: Maverick,” as the prisoner who narrates Saunders’s story, and Jurnee Smollett, an Emmy nominee for “Lovecraft Country,” in a role that has been added for the film.

"Spiderhead" toggles between brutal, abrupt violence and a redemptive happy ending a long, long way from the short story's. The actors do what they can en ...

The script for “Spiderhead” makes a rookie mistake: It lets the audience get too far out ahead of the Teller character’s moral and narrative awakening. The facetious use of obvious pop hits (”She Blinded Me With Science,” et al.) belongs to “Deadpool” wise-assery, not this premise. It’s fair game for a movie to go its own way, but director Joseph Kosinski toggles between brutal, abrupt violence — there’s a flashback to a body flying through a windshield we really don’t need to see twice — and a redemptive happy ending a long, long way from the short story’s. “Spiderhead” takes its time revealing what’s up with these experiments, and whether there’s a way out of this pharmacological hell. In the control room, aka Spiderhead, aided by a morally queasy assistant (Mark Paguio), Hemsworth’s character takes smug delight in administering, via an app on his phone, strategic doses of un-inhibitors to his subjects. Teller plays one of the inmates, haunted by a fatal mistake behind the wheel years earlier; Smollett portrays his lover and fellow inmate, likewise trying to shut out her own personal tragedy.

"Spiderhead" was made for promos -- Chris Hemsworth! Miles Teller! The director of "Top Gun: Maverick!" The writers of "Deadpool!

Still, it's more of a gift to the Netflix marketing department than it is to viewers who brave its web. Because this is one of those movies that's forgotten almost as soon as it ends, and it doesn't even require any chemical intervention in order to erase the memory. Meanwhile, a more conventional bond begins to form between two of the inmates, Jeff (Teller), who seems to be one of Steve's favorite subjects; and Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett), who like Jeff is nursing scars from the outside world.

George Saunders is legendary in the literary community. He's one of the few authors who has made a name for himself almost entirely on short stories, ...

Jeff, in the story, killed a friend in a drunken fight as a teenager. The regret eats at him, and when Heather dies and he faces the prospect of condemning Rachel to the same fate, he thinks, “It was like all I had to do to be a killer again was sit there and wait.” Jeff’s “escape” is his resistance to complicity. Saunders borrows the language of advertising and the ambitions of institutions to grapple with their dehumanizing effects. Erecting a monumental frame for his parable could, as I’m sure the filmmakers argued, heighten the scope of the pharma company’s power in the narrative, a visual symbol of their unstoppable plutocracy, but I couldn’t help but think of how expensive it all looked, how only a major studio could afford to build it. In Kosinski’s adaptation, it’s the developing love between Jeff and Lizzy that motivates them to fight back against the corporate juggernaut. After rereading the story in preparation for the film, I wondered how they would turn what essentially adds up to a bottled parable into a big-budget film, and to my surprise, Kosinski and his screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (who also scripted the Deadpool films) pretty faithfully stick to Saunders’s plot. The whole moral point is that the goodness of humanity persists even when it’s clinically proven that there isn’t love there. In one experiment, Jeff is introduced to Heather. They are both asked what they think of each other, attraction-wise, and they both reply that they’re mostly indifferent. In the testing room sit Heather and Rachel, who don’t know that they both, earlier that day, fell in love with and had intense sex with the same person who at this very moment is watching them behind the two-way glass. He now teaches at a highly respected MFA program at Syracuse, but in the bio of his first book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), it says that he “works as a geophysical engineer” and that “he has explored for oil in Sumatra, played guitar in a Texas bar band, and worked in a slaughterhouse.” He was 38. To start, here is a summary of Saunders’s original: a man named Jeff is a prisoner in a facility that tests out some pretty high-concept drugs. But when the drug wears off, Jeff retains absolutely none of these emotions, and neither does Heather.

What they sacrifice as punishment is their brain chemistry for science, which is toyed with by Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth), following the orders of a ...

A lot of “Spiderhead” relies on the curiosity of its premise, which is teased by watching Hemsworth push Teller through different procedures, creating a friendship that this movie treats as its light stakes. The movie can be so backwards that even its lead can seems out of place—it’s initially interesting to see Hemsworth play someone as disarming as he is manipulative, but he becomes a heavy-handed expression of the movie’s limited statements about science, power, control. It’s motivated to depict how the American prison system could be more humane, but then the plot's larger reveals about what's really going on are as close to an anti-surprise as you can get. The literal act of Abnesti turning them different ways becomes almost a conceit of a movie that itself is forcing its power, its vague reason to exist. “Spiderhead” imagines a different kind of prison system—one with an open-door policy that allows the incarcerated to have their sense of self, to cook for themselves, to work out when they want to. “Spiderhead,” the latest film from Joseph Kosinski after last month’s “ Top Gun: Maverick,” agrees with me, because with its many similarities it even has its mad scientist—played by a winking Chris Hemsworth—grooving to pop music.

Joseph Kosinski has already directed the hit of the summer with “Top Gun: Maverick.” His new sci-fi thriller, “Spiderhead,” drops on Netflix Friday.

Just know what you’re getting into and repeat after the inmates each time they agree to a new drug drip: “Acknowledge.” Maybe that’s the point, but it seems the director is enjoying it a bit too much. Oscar Isaac was more believable in “Ex Machina,” but Hemsworth at least lends charm to his drug-addict scientist antagonist.

Jurnee Smollett plays Lizzy in Netflix's Spiderhead, alongside Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller. Read the actor's interview on the psychological thriller.

"It definitely challenged me to kind of inspect [the shame] within myself a lot and go to those really uncomfortable places," she shares. "There was a lot of deep, emotional pain that I was trying to metabolise while also feeling so disconnected from the world," she explains. The warm setting and the actors' characters' exploration of human willingness and manipulation prompted Smollett to do some reflecting of her own. Those are some of the things that I was exploring with [Lizzy]." Steve's subjects, Jeff ( Miles Teller) and Lizzy (Smollett), form a connection in the prison they're serving out sentences in as they fall victim to his controversial tests of free will that he hopes will go on to change the pharmaceutical world. Its connection to the movie, inspired by The New Yorker's 2010 "Escape From Spiderhead" short story, was too strong for Smollett to ignore.

Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth) has his very own experiment set up on Spiderhead, an island that takes prisoners from incarceration and sets them up as test ...

He goes from fear, to laughter, and finally to serenity as the Luvactin kicks in and he sees a surreal glow in the distance. Lizzy and Jeff are still feeling the after-effects of their experiments as they speed away from Spiderhead on a boat. Throughout the movie, Ray was hunting for ‘Shit-Finger’, a mystery prisoner who was smearing faeces on the walls of the complex. Instead of intentionally crashing his plane to avoid the consequences, it appears to be a result of a faulty MobiPak, which is pumping all manner of drugs into his system. Jeff clearly feels guilt for the accident that caused Emma’s death, and his updates on her answering machine is certainly a way of communicating that. He heads to his plane and, as he ascends, his MobiPak goes haywire, giving him a cocktail of all the drugs he’s used in his experiments. Throughout the movie, we see flashbacks of the event that caused Jeff to get locked up. He eventually gets Jeff to make a decision by lying to him and telling the prisoner that the board have told him to press on with the experiment. Jeff has called in the police and manages to save Lizzy and escape the island by boat. It’s explained that Steve has been using it throughout the movie as a means to test how far the subjects would really go against the people they love. The Luvactin overpowers him, and he mistakes a rockface for a beautiful ray of sunlight, crashing his plane. Jeff grows closer to another prisoner, Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett), and the two fall in love.

The new movie "Spiderhead," starring Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller, distorts a great George Saunders story into an empty good-versus-evil tale.

A couple of new, auxiliary drugs feel true to the story, and the original bits of the score are effective. “Escape From Spiderhead” builds on motifs he developed in other stories, like corporate involvement in law enforcement (“My Flamboyant Grandson”) and medicated captive research subjects (“Jon”). Some of his protagonists must respond to methodical violence by joining in or paying a price (“Ghoul,” “ Elliott Spencer”). By personalizing the story’s threat in Abnesti, the writers remove the existential dilemma on which Saunders hung his plot. “Escape From Spiderhead” is one of Saunders’ most horrific tales, but its run-of-the-mill bureaucracy invites reader identification. But Kosinski leans heavily on a handful of glam, New Wave and soft-rock songs to signify — what, exactly? On the other, they have unsupervised access to knives (never mind belts, glass vessels, underwire bras, etc.; this Spiderhead is crawling with contraband). In another sense though, the prison-industrial complex is a constant human experiment: How young can we lock people up? One can only dream of what a surrealist like David Lynch or Josephine Decker would have done with the scenes. Yet in “Spiderhead,” the adaptation by Joseph Kosinski (“ Top Gun: Maverick”) that opens this week, Saunders’ work is little more than a prop. George Saunders’ “ Escape From Spiderhead” is the stuff of nightmares, or at least of mine: torture, mind control, lifelong regret. Despite a charade of consent, subjects are aware that if they refuse to cooperate, the experimenters can fax Albany for permission to use an obedience drug. Sparing Jeff the tough choices, the writers shunt moral transformation onto a minor character. The film’s writers, Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese (“Deadpool”), fundamentally misconstrue Saunders’ story.

Miles Teller and Chris Hemsworth go head-to-head in a prison that tests mind-altering drugs in the new 'Spiderhead' sci-fi movie streaming on Netflix.

Spiderhead keeps the acid tone of the story (though sadly missing a lot of the bizarre flowery language), as its characters are subjected to more and more manipulative treatments. The creepy premise is adapted (by Deadpool guys Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick) from George Saunders' story "Escape from Spiderhead," which was first published in The New Yorker in 2010, and, if you've never read him before, is a perfect introduction to Saunders' ability to weave together the funny and the macabre. The facility is built on a remote tropical island apart from civilization, but things seem to be happening in the world outside that are connected to the drugs. Jeff and his fellow inmates have been fitted with "MobiPaks," mechanical cartridges attached at the base of their spines that hold vials of different types of liquid, within which are prototypes of mind-control drugs with marketable nicknames like "Verbaluce" and "Laffodil." Daily, Jeff visits an observation room run by Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth), the guy in charge of the facility who carries out various experiments on the somewhat willing participants, testing the efficacy of the company's new drugs. Jeff (Miles Teller) lives in the Spiderhead, a high-tech private prison facility housing a group of convicts who have volunteered to participate in an experimental program rather than wait out their sentences in a state-run prison. Whether they're set in the far future, a few weeks from now, or an alternate version of the past, even the weirdest and darkest science fiction stories are mirrors to our own present.

The 'Thor's star's latest thriller is from the director of 'Top Gun: Maverick.'

There’s a drug for that, too. There’s a drug for that. (His other is a little indie action picture you might have heard of called Top Gun: Maverick.) In this film, Hemsworth stars as the head of a mysterious prison where the inmates — including Miles Teller and Jurnee Smollett — willingly subject themselves to experiments where they are injected with drugs that alter their perception of reality.

Chris Hemsworth ponders musingly, or muses ponderously, in the foreground of a barren concrete Image: Netflix. Happy Friday, Polygon readers! This week brings a ...

It is now available for rent at a reduced price of $5.99. In this one, the Crawley family travels to France after a mysterious inheritance. This South African crime thriller comes from French director Fabien Martorell, who previously worked on documentaries and short films. Unlike the 1950 version with Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, and Elizabeth Taylor, or the 1991 movie with Steve Martin, Diane Keaton, and Kimberly Williams, the new adaptation focuses on a Cuban American family. Nearly 30 years in the making, VFX artist-director Phil Tippett’s Mad God is a nightmarish odyssey through a dystopian world of Boschian grotesqueries and phantasmagorical landscapes. She brings across her character’s conflicted state in captivating ways, with an alluring effervescence and genuine personality. The third film in what’s been described as director Joachim Trier’s “Oslo trilogy,” The Worst Person in the World is a romantic black comedy centered on Julie (Renate Reinsve), a medical student stumbling through an underwhelming love life and a troubled career path. Morbius is what happens when there’s a studio desire for another Venom, but without much thought as to how Venom connected with anyone. Audiences do turn out for characters they love, but they also show up for characters played by people, by actors who give them weird quirks and specific mannerisms. And now you can rent it at the reduced price of $5.99. “Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski and the writers of Deadpool team up to adapt a dystopian short story by George Saunders” is a real description of a real movie that really exists. This time out, he’s working with Chris Hemsworth, Miles Teller, and the writing team behind the Deadpool movies and 6 Underground on a cerebral sci-fi.

In 'Spiderhead,' nothing is what it seems. Here's a breakdown of that wild twist ending,. Spiderhead Explained Netflix Movie. Netflix.

Where the story is about abuse and exploitation, the film is about the perseverance of love. This asserts a kind of cynicism and unavoidability inherent in Spiderhead, where in the film, Jeff starts off with a kind of naive optimism. Unlike in the film, B6 doesn’t come in the form of a twist. Perhaps the latter is the way it is because of Hollywood’s need for a happy ending. The two get out right in the nick of time, though, and race back to the mainland on a boat. Perhaps B6 was always the end goal, and the other drugs were simply a means to an end. The love drug, for example, has the potential to allow the administrator to test whether or not a subject will harm his loved one while under the influence of B6. The honesty drug is simply another form of obedience, too, and Darkenfloxx is nothing more than an elevated form of torture. But the end of Spiderhead isn’t all rainbows and butterflies. One can safely assume, then, that once Jeff and Lizzy return to the mainland, they will live a happy life together. And on a smaller scale, Jeff’s love for Lizzy is what finally gives him the strength to break free from Spiderhead’s grasp, despite initially believing that he deserved his treatment at the facility due to the nature of the crime that sent him there. Jeff then decides to stop his boss once and for all, and the two get in a fight, which leads Steve’s drug box to break and subsequently flood him with a cocktail of his own nefarious potions. This time, we consider the ending of the new Netflix psychological thriller Spiderhead. Yes, prepare for spoilers.

This article contains Spiderhead spoilers. It looks almost blissful. That serene sunset Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth) imagines he's flying toward might as ...

So being asked to let Jeff go free and destroy his life’s work is a bridge too far, and one that gives Steve the free will to fight back. At the end of the movie, Jeff commands Steve to open the doors to Spiderhead and help him destroy the scientist’s life’s work. The short and obvious answer is that Jeff appealed to Mark’s sympathies. It is Jeff’s self-loathing guilt, his new pampered lifestyle, and the B-6 that all influence his decisions. Once perfected, Steve intended to sell it to businesses (and governments?) under the name O-B-D-X (Obediex). What sort of authority wouldn’t want something that “could get you to follow an order antithetical to your deepest values and emotions?” So Steve would try to pump Jeff up with “love” for Heather (Tess Haubrich) via N-40, but the experiment wasn’t to prove that it would make folks become infatuated with one another—even to the point of ripping their clothes off right in front of voyeurs! However, Jeff still was consenting to things he might not have otherwise—like eventually giving Heather the Darkenfluxx. Was he broken down by Steve’s pressure?

Spiderhead director Joseph Kosinski and producer Eric Newman address the truth behind their new Netflix thriller.

To do it in an American accent, to be so charming and funny and entertaining, but also have the starkness and just the complexity of this almost sociopathic character to me was such a fun thing to see on set every single day and I’m really, really excited for people to see it.” “I don’t think there’s anything in this film that isn’t in the not-so-distant future for us. While the film does have a futuristic feel to it with the minimalist facility and technology used to administer the drugs, both insist that the events of Spiderhead are closer to reality than you might think.

A dark fable about corporate obedience gets Miles Teller and Chris Hemsworth—and loses its teeth.

(In the movie, Abnesti has been trying and failing to devise a drug to render people docile—which is just a bit of flattery for all the average folks out there who are convinced they’d have been conscientious objectors in the Milgram Obedience Experiment. Milgram didn’t even need drugs to prove otherwise!) Jeff decides that the only way out is to commit suicide by ODing on Darkenfloxx himself. In an absurd rush at the end to reassure the audience that everyone will be fine, the movie delivers the breathless news that both Jeff and Lizzy have already served their time, even as Abnesti’s disillusioned assistant arrives at the lab with the police—not a positive development in any Saunders short story I can imagine, but treated here like the advent of the cavalry. The movie turns Abnesti into a rogue scientist, an individual whose schemes can be thwarted by exposure, but the Abnesti of the short story is just a middle man, part of a system that can’t be overthrown because it’s everywhere. After he refuses to consent to the experiment, Abnesti steps out to get a vial of another drug that will render him compliant. “Even if I didn’t like the person very much, even if I hated the person, I still wouldn’t want to do it.” It’s easier, after all, to suffer for the people we love than for the sake of flawed strangers. (In the movie, he drives drunk and slams into a tree, killing two passengers, including his own wife.) “I don’t even know why I did it,” he admits. Now they—the unseen board whom Abnesti says he takes his orders from—want to administer the drug to one of the women while Jeff describes his response under the tongue-loosening influence of Verbaluce. In the film, the lab is a brutalist concrete outpost on an unspoiled island. “I just didn’t want to do that to anyone,” he realizes. As with all dosings in Spiderhead, the inmates must verbally consent to the proceedings by saying “Acknowledge.” When Jeff shows no preference for saving either woman, the experiment is deemed a success and neither gets Darkenfloxx. But later, Abnesti calls Jeff in to explain that these results aren’t good enough. They can also make people fall briefly but madly in love with whoever happens to be in the room. But entertainment conventions demand that our heroes rebel, fight back, and then light out for the territories, as if injustice can be eluded with a change of scenery.

This review of the Netflix film Spiderhead does not contain spoilers. I've never really put any stock into how much it costs to make a movie. All I care.

Still, the third act’s problems overshadow big ideas, and a performance by Hemsworth is too much to ignore. Yes, the film was an entertaining ride for most of its run. The big twist that Spiderhead is working towards is explained by a bingo card that is ridiculously eye-rolling. They want to see which one he would give a painful mental drug called Darkenfloxx that will send one of them down a rabbit hole of mental health that one may not recover. Except, I wouldn’t call the script convoluted; for every big swing that connects, there is one that misses badly. All I care about is if I enjoyed the film experience or not.

How does the new Netflix movie starring Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller stack up next to the story it's based on?

Abnesti, meanwhile, gets to his private plane and takes off, but still overwhelmed by the different emotions and sensations in his system, crashes into the side of a mountain. Jeff manages to get to Lizzy in time and pull the Darkenfloxx out of her MobiPak before it’s fully delivered. In both the story and the movie, Abnesti uses Luvactin to make Jeff have sex and fall in love, one after the other, with two different women. We don’t see much of him in the short story, but in the movie he’s played by Mark Paguio and he’s treated by Abnesti almost as a butler and bit of a punching bag, instead of an equal and fellow scientist. In the movie at least, he’s also an addict: He’s got a MobiPak attached to his lower back and pumps himself with some of his formulas. Thematically, that really locked in the movie for us in terms of creating a love story between Jeff and Lizzy, two people who fall in love in the most inhospitable of climates for love: prison walls.” Abnesti controls the MobiPaks through a remote-control device, which is visualized in the movie as more or less a smartphone (which Abnesti also uses to select the yacht rock that pumps constantly through the prison). Twice in the movie, physical violence causes someone’s MobiPak to rupture, sending an uncontrolled torrent of drugs into the subject’s system. Many elements are retained from the story: the facility where Jeff and the others are confined is said in the story to be comfortable and full of amenities, which we see in the movie itself. It is their love that breaks Abnesti’s hold over Jeff, whereas in the short story, Jeff just becomes too horrified at what Abnesti is doing to him and the others. Where things take a major turn is with the introduction of Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett), another inmate with whom Jeff begins a friendship that eventually turns into a full-on relationship free of the influence of the drugs. Reese and Wernick make several additions to Saunders’ story, including the introduction of a major new character and changes to both Jeff and Abnesti’s histories. The movie is actually pretty faithful to the story for about half of its running time, even though the story itself fills maybe 10 pages in print.

Chris Hemsworth, Miles Teller, and Jurnee Smollett star in the new sci-fi thriller from Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski.

Since then, Haubrich has starred in Australian television programs Pine Gap and Bad Mothers, while also landing a recurring part in the Bourne spin-off television series Treadstone. Tess Haubrich stars as Heather, a prisoner at Spiderhead who embraces her reputation as an agitator. Miles Teller made an impact with his debut film role in Rabbit Holeas a teen guilt-ridden over his part in the accidental death of a toddler. Jones will also be reprising his Fury Road role in Furiosa, once again sharing the screen with Hemsworth. Jurnee Smollett stars as Lizzy, a prisoner at the Spiderhead penitentiary who willingly signs up to participate in experiments involving mind-altering drugs in exchange for a lenient sentence. In exchange for a commuted sentence, Jeff agrees to volunteer for an experiment involving mind-altering drugs that are administered from a surgically attached device.

The latest Netflix original movie Spiderhead is a science fiction thriller film directed by Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski.

The short story, like the film, focuses on a character named Jeff, who is subjected to several tests through experimental drugs at a facility where he is imprisoned. Many films and TV shows today are loosely based on written works, but Spiderhead isn't based on a book. Filming also took place during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

Netflix's Spiderhead (Chris Hemsworth, Miles Teller) adapts the George Saunders short story "Escape from Spiderhead." Here's what happened at the end of ...

The final scene of the story, however, involves a second forced Darkenfloxx—but with another sexual partner, not some romantic interest. As in the film, the first forced Darkenfloxx drip for one of Jeff’s sexual partners ends in her death. The obedience drug is used in the story, but it is not the primary purpose of the experiments. Jeff then uses the drug controls on Abnesti, who resists and still manages to Darkenfloxx Lizzy. Before the Lizzy experiment, however, Jeff convinces Abnesti’s assistant to remove the obedience drug from his pack and outfit Abnesti instead with the drug. With both blockbuster film and TV adaptations of hit novels—Ready Player One, Dune, Brave New World, and, most ambitiously, The Three-Body Problem (yet to come)—and newer adaptations of short stories—Arrival, the Invisible Man, and now Spiderhead—the big and small screens are scouring the library for new source material.

In Netflix Original Spiderhead, Hemsworth gets the chance to test his acting chops as a scientist pushing the boundaries of medical ethics.

Chris Hemsworth is great in Spiderhead, but it’s a baseline film otherwise. Chris Hemsworth is great in Spiderhead, but it’s a baseline film otherwise. That said, Spiderhead is my favorite Hemsworth role next to him being directed by Taika Waititi as Thor. There is a selfishness and chaos that Hemsworth brings to Steve beautifully, expressly when those two elements turn into anger and determination. This push and pull against each other that works the best in the film, but that leaves much of the science and moral questions by the wayside. Even though the tests and their results propel the story and affect the relationships in the movie, the dynamic between Jeff and Steve is pulled into focus. Instead of being reflexive or referential to the history of medical testing on inmates, the science fiction nature of it all makes it seem like something out of reach for reality versus a genuine part of history that continues today.