Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
A prisoner in a state-of-the-art penitentiary begins to question the purpose of the emotion-controlling drugs he's testing for a pharmaceutical genius.
Spiderhead has a promising premise drawn from George Saunders' short story but squanders it with a muddled second act and a generic thriller resolution. Chris Hemsworth brings charismatic menace and Miles Teller is committed, elevating the material somewhat. The Australian coastal setting is visually appealing and competently shot but not especially distinctive. The film covers familiar dystopian/pharmaceutical-thriller territory without adding much new to the genre, and the ending devolves into a standard escape thriller rather than capitalizing on its more unsettling psychological possibilities.