Spiderhead Review: An Anti-Exploitation Fable Undone by Wishful Thinking

Joseph Kosinski’s Spiderhead takes place in a prison, albeit not one that will be insantly recognizable to most Americans. Befitting the Top Gun: Maverick director’s fascination (and unease) with sleek, modern design and what it says about human individuality, the facility here looks like a Silicon Valley company’s campus, all blinding white walls and common spaces arranged in honeycomb-shaped recesses. It all gives a false sense of warmth, but a prison it remains, where its inmates serve as medical guinea pigs for new pharmaceutical drugs in exchange for nicer living conditions and the opportunity for commuted sentences.

The film follows Jeff (Miles Teller), a convict who dutifully agrees to each new test administered by warden Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth), who closely monitors the effects of drugs that are meant to alter the moods and abilities of inmates, including sexual arousal, elocution, and elation. The film’s first half watches Jeff as he goes through these experiments, often multiple times per drug, his reactions laid bare for an overseer who calmly goads the prisoner to perform whatever action his chemically altered body wills him to do.

Teller plays Jeff with a believably detached air, the result of both the character’s medically induced imprisonment and his lingering guilt over the fatal drunk-driving accident that landed him in the state-of-the-art penitentiary. Even the affectionate relationship that he enjoys with fellow inmate Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett) has a quiet desperation to it, less romantic in nature than expressive of his need for some measure of companionship. Jeff’s existence here is repetitive by design, with even freakish and sudden of explosions of euphoric laughter and sexual frenzy becoming quotidian, and Teller sells the man’s weary resignation.

At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum is Hemsworth, who channels all his Marvel-honed smarm into Steve’s blasé attitude toward being essentially the Josef Mengele of Big Pharma. Steve is a classic Silicon Valley villain, speaking in lofty terms about how the medicine that he’s testing will improve the world and at times clearly taking a page or two from the megalomaniacal proclamations of disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes.

Steve is the sort of person who plans his day down to the minute to convince himself that he’s the hardest working man in the penitentiary, which feeds into the way that he speaks to his quasi-volunteering inmates almost like employees. His façade of cheerfulness makes his clinical observations all the more disturbing, especially when Abnesti Pharmaceuticals moves toward testing drugs meant to induce less positive moods in the facility’s inmates.

The film is based on George Saunders’s New Yorker short story “Escape from Spiderhead,” and it mirrors its plot until the climax. Saunders’s story bleakly concludes that the best we might be able to hope for in an increasingly corporatized, dehumanized world is the possibility of dying with some sense of self intact. By contrast, the film takes a more Hollywoodized approach to the material, which results in a resistance-heralding second half that’s shot through with slapstick comedy as drugged-up captives and jailers are pit against each other.

Coming off the heels of increasingly dark revelations about the experiments performed by Abnesti Pharmaceuticals and their purpose, this abrupt tonal shift ironically deepens the characters’ sense of hollowness instead of liberating them from it. That glibness can be glimpsed elsewhere. Early scenes of Jeff and other inmates suddenly lunging at each other in drugged-up sexual passion are played at least partially for laughs, which obscures the way that these moments depict a new evolution of the epidemic of prison rape—the thin sliver of plausible deniability offered by the inmates’ forced consent the only real joke in this scenario.

By ultimately resolving the story around a direct confrontation with Steve, Spiderhead narrows its understanding of a system in which exploitation is privatized. At its best, Spiderhead subtly suggests that the future might make guinea pigs and prisoners out of anyone too far down the socioeconomic ladder, but it feels like wishful thinking to suggest that usurping one or two people at the top rungs can reverse the dystopia.