‘Sting’ Review: Killer Spider Flick Lacks Bite
Chad Collins
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Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting endeavors to be TV dinner horror. Warm, comfortable, familiar, and perhaps most importantly, accessible. Amblin-esque in sensibility (though considerably more violent), the broad brushstrokes of Roache-Turner’s claustrophobic creature feature sees a family in domestic crisis contending with an extraterrestrial spider in their New York City apartment building. It’s a little bit Gremlins, a little E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and a whole lot of Arachnophobia. Yet, the worst impulses of homage horror sink their fangs into Sting before it can deliver a bite of its own.
While a killer, mutant spider movie doesn’t necessarily need a solid emotional core to work, Sting places undue emphasis on it anyway, regularly undermining what B-movie thrills it might otherwise have with vexing, often regressive characterizations. Charlotte (Alyla Brown) lives in an incredulously large city apartment with her mother, Heather (Penelope Mitchell) and stepfather, Ethan (Ryan Corr). She’s up against a new baby with some remarkably mature adolescent angst, talking not like a child, but a world-weary adult. She feels left out and resultantly finds, houses, and cares for the titular Sting, a (at first) cute little spider that hatches from a meteorite in her room.
Eccentricity abounds in the early expositional moments. An ice storm rages outside, keeping the other residents locked inside to succumb to their worst, stereotypical impulses. Humor is culled from Eastern European accents, dementia, and Jermaine Fowler’s exterminator Frank, an actor trying his best, regularly let down by a script that reduces him to a caricature of what Michael Scott might think a Black man would sound like.
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Charlotte’s mood worsens, Sting grows bigger, and soon, the spider is running amok, offing resident after resident until the fractured family at its core must come together to save the day. Structurally, Sting could work as a claustrophobic thriller in the vein of something like Attack the Block. Yet, where Attack the Block merged its monstrous thrills with pressing social commentary, Sting relapses into Lifetime Channel melodrama, ending up pathological when it should be psychological.
Charlotte, though gamely performed by Alyla Brown, is, frankly, terrible. Her mother, Heather, isn’t much better. Ethan is marginally more sympathetic, though their family drama is the catalyst for Sting’s rampage, and they never slow down to consider their role in it. Case in point? Ethan confronts Charlotte for keeping a venomous spider in the apartment with a newborn. Heather gets mad at Ethan.
Luckily, practical effects courtesy of Weta Workshop deliver what counts most. Culling from techniques used 20 years ago to conceive Shelob in The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Sting is a 3D-printed gem, a tactile, ferocious little beast that terrifies whenever he appears on screen, even if it’s too irregular for a movie named after him.
And that terror is, in some part, innate to the conceit, not the execution. Arachnophobes will no doubt be horrified as a spider crawls into a woman’s mouth and out her throat. Going for Jaws, the sight of a small dog yapping at something unseen in the darkness will almost certainly spell doom. The tropes are there, and there’s solid craftsmanship to render them convincing, but like the most disappointing monster movies of today, eight legs soon become two. When we’re back to the humans, Sting doesn’t threaten to hurt. It just threatens to irritate.
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Sting
Summary
Sting is the cinematic equivalent of a spider bite.
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