STING - Mark Reviews Movies

Sting, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 11, 2024

Sting goes for that sweet but difficult spot between a genuine, nasty creature feature and one that's cleverly self-aware. The attempts at overt humor let down writer/director Kiah Roache-Turner's efforts, which make a better case for the grisly parts than the comedic ones. That doesn't mean it's not wickedly funny at times, even as a venomous and very hungry spider from outer space grows exponentially and does what such a creature would do, but there's a big difference between trying to be funny and simply finding the humor that's right there.

The movie opens more in the former vein with a flash-forward that seems to give away a lot more than it actually does. An older woman with dementia hears some noises coming from the walls of her apartment and assumes there's some sort of pest crawling around in there. We can tell it's no ordinary nuisance, what with the loud clomping and screeching. Frank (Jermaine Fowler), a local exterminator, comes to the rescue, only to discover that another exterminator the woman called earlier is on the verge of a bloody end inside the ventilation ducts.

The whole scene, from Frank's wise-cracking to—questionably, especially since the joke continues throughout the story—the elderly woman's memory loss, is played mostly for laughs. The same goes when the story resets to a few weeks prior, as some space object flies through the atmosphere, crashes through a Brooklyn apartment window and a dollhouse within, and opens to reveal an itsy-bitsy arachnid that crawls through the miniature house as if it owns the place.

That spider is found by a pre-teen girl named Charlotte (Alyla Browne), who has a demented sense of imagination. Such a kid is thrilled to have a pet like this one, which she keeps in a jar and soon makes it known that it wants food by whistling to the girl. A biologist neighbor later explains that spiders don't have vocal cords, making such a feat naturally impossible, but if Charlotte thinks it's weird that her pet spider Sting starts mimicking larger animals, she's too overwhelmed with how cool it is. The implication, of course, is that, as it grows, the spider is becoming hungry for larger prey.

This is pretty simple stuff, but the story of a girl and her predatory spider has a certain, twisted charm to it. Less convincing is the screenplay's shift toward a domestic drama, as Charlotte deals with conflicting feelings about her building superintendent and comic-book artist stepfather Ethan (Ryan Corr), the stepdad tries to impress the kid, and his wife Heather (Penelope Mitchell), Charlotte's mother, debates whether or not to tell her daughter that her biological father, whom the girl hasn't seen in years, lives just across the borough.

It feels a bit disingenuous to invest so much time in these relationships when, from the jump, the movie announces that all of its non-alien-spider characters are pretty much disposable—or, better within this context, fodder. That's the inherently dark comedy of a movie such as this, especially when Roache-Turner gives us an assortment of quirky, flawed, and/or slightly cruel characters who only exist to become eventual prey. For example, there's Heather's aunt Gunter (Robyn Nevin), who shares an apartment with her sister Helga (Noni Hazlehurst), the woman with dementia and Heather's mother. She's just generally mean, making her expendable.

The same goes for Maria (Silvia Colloca), a neighbor who enjoys a drink or three and becomes the first display of what the spider is capable of doing to a human body. As for biology expert Erik (Danny Kim), he becomes fascinated by the unusual arachnid, and that's never a good sign that a character will be around when the end credits start in a movie like this.

The problem, then, is one of tone and, more specifically, how the three distinct ones here—the ironic distance of watching characters who have it coming actually get it, the more broadly jokey elements, the sincere family drama leading to attempts at actual tension—never gel completely. To be sure, some of it is amusing—and impishly so—when the spider starts baiting and luring its victims with its skills (The use of a physical puppet once the spider becomes large enough for that approach gives the monster a tangible unpleasantness).

On the flip side, a couple of scenes are frightening, such as when one of Sting's future meals can't communicate with someone nearby due to paralysis. The staging of that particular scene is clever, making it serve as an ideal example of what Roache-Turner tries to do with the material—without succeeding nearly as well. It's scary, yes, but the bad-luck-and-timing mechanics of the sequence, as well as the potential promise of the filmmaker subverting one of the story's major setups, add just the right note of self-aware—and quite bleak—humor to the moment.

The confidence and craft of that scene is an outlier in Sting, although the eventual shift toward a more straightforward standoff between the surviving humans and the spider occasionally comes close. The last act is the right kind of fun, at least, especially since Roache-Turner is no longer trying to balance so many dissimilar elements, characters, and tones. That section serves as just an old-fashioned sort of monster movie, which is ironically refreshing after witnessing so much extraneous effort to make the material something more.

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