Spiderhead is a 2022 Netflix science fiction film starring Chris Hemsworth, Miles Teller, and Jurnee Smollett and directed by Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy, Top Gun: Maverick). It is based on the short story Escape from Spiderhead by George Saunders.
The movie follows two convicts living in the near future who have volunteered for medical experiments in exchange for lighter sentences. One of them is given a drug that gives him the ability to love, and he begins questioning the reality of his emotions as he sets out to find the truth.
The film was released on June 17th.
This film provides examples of:
- Affably Evil: Steve is friendly, polite and jocular. He often points out all of the nice things he does for his inmates. he's lying to them all about the nature of his research.
- AM/FM Characterization: All of the Source Music that appears in the film is a personal selection and under direct control of Steve through his cell phone, and all of it is easy listening music. It seems at first that it's just him trying to keep a loose, calm environment in Spiderhead, but the fact that it's under his direct control says a lot more about him that it first appears.
- Big Bad: Steve Abnesti is the main antagonist in charge of the titular prison where he subjects his prisoners to his drugs.
- Blaming the Victim:
- Multiple times, when one inmate is shown to be reluctant to administer a torture drug to another, Steve will bring up the would-be victim's crimes to convince the other inmate that they deserve their punishment. He mentions this to Jeff twice, first with Heather, then later with Lizzy.
- Jeff at one point says the same, but the victim he's blaming is himself.
- Brainwashing: Steve is using his other trials to test a drug that will make people do what they're told without exception, even against their strongest principles.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The various drugs all have different colors that can be seen on the back of their Mobi-Paks - for example, Luvactin is a bright, light blue.
- Driven to Suicide: Heather, while under the influence of Darkenfloxx. In the climax, Steve nearly has Lizzy follow suit, but Jeff manages to save her in time after a brutal fight with Steve.
- Emotion Bomb: The drugs being tested at the facility often heighten or induce various emotions. I-27 (Phobica) causes heightened fear. G-46 (Laffodil) makes users laugh uncontrollably. N-40 (Luvactin) causes temporary feelings of love. I-16 (Darkenfloxx) appears to induce physical pain as well as despair.
- Foreshadowing: Multiple examples.
- At one point, Mark warns Jeff that jostling the device could cause it to flood their body with an uncontrolled dosage of all its contents. This is what happens to Heather while on Darkenfloxx and later to Steve himself.
- At several points we hear Steve, the warden, giving orders to his inmates. During Heather's last trial, while her system is flooded with Darkenfloxx, he orders her to sit down and not to move. He then argues with Mark when she does not react at all and is still able to stab herself with a broken table. This foreshadows the big reveal that the red obedience drug is what he is actually testing; Jeff was able to see that she had the red drug in her pack as well. Steve is actually angry because whatever was happening with her allowed her to ignore a direct order.
- Heel–Face Turn: Mark, after Jeff reveals the truth to him about Steve.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Steve has been fitted with the same device as his prisoners to use some of the drugs himself. Jeff convinces Mark to add the B-6 Obediex to the device so that Jeff can later dose him with it.
- I've Come Too Far: Steve's justification for continuing his tests. Mark disagrees, and later his uncertainty causes him to turn on his boss.
- Kingpin in His Gym: One scene has Steve hitting mitts with Dave. He later uses his boxing skills in a fistfight.
- Lack of Empathy: Steve speaks of his tests on Luvactin as a way to help people who are incapable of feeling love for others. It's really a means to an end to test his Obediex drug.
- Laughing Mad: One of the drugs being tested, Laffodil, causes the user to laugh at even things that would normally be depressing or horrifying.
- Love Makes You Evil: Steve says in the end that he's discovered his obedience drug will not cause someone to hurt someone or something they truly love - in his case, he's in love with his work, reinforced by his own doses of Luvactin. This is what gives him the drive to keep going with horrible experiments and the strength to attack Jeff despite Jeff having dosed him with "enough B-6 to tame a lion."
- Love Potion: One of the drugs that they're testing, N-40 (AKA Luvactin,) is a combination of types 1 and 3 as it makes people fall in love with whatever or whoever they see, up to having sex with each other without regard to anyone observing. The point of testing it is to see if there are any residual effects on the users' emotions once the drug is flushed out of their systems. There aren't.
- Mad Scientist: Steve experiments on his prisoners to perfect his brainwashing drug.
- Manipulative Bastard: Steve is good at manipulating both his prisoners and his right-hand man Mark. Played with on the part of the inmates; he was testing an obedience drug on them, so it difficult to determine how much of his success with them was manipulation and how much was the effects of the drug.
- Medication Tampering: Could be considered the premise of the entire movie. Most notably, Mark does this to Steve by giving Jeff access to his drug injection remote and giving him vials of various drugs he wouldn't normally have in his pack, including the brainwashing drug they've been testing all along.
- My God, What Have I Done?: After Heather's drug-induced suicide, Mark begins to question if what they are doing is right.
- Nebulous Evil Organisation: Steve tells Jeff he's being pushed to perform his tests by a protocol committee and that he doesn't want to make the inmates fall in love and then ask them to torture each other. Revealed to be a lie when Jeff finds his company's letterhead and realizes that Steve owns the company and isn't actually answering to anyone.
- "Not So Different" Remark: Steve claims that he and Jeff are not so different because they are both trapped by their pasts.
- Offing the Offspring: Lizzy is in prison because she killed her child.
- One-Track-Minded Hunger: An inmate named Dave is seen eating ridiculous amounts of food, both during and outside of the drug trial room; it's implied that he's testing another drug that is never named. He cannot stop eating even immediately after vomiting. His food fixation is even stronger than his drive to obey orders due to the B-6 drug, as Lizzy is able to stop him from chasing after Jeff and herself by giving him the key to the pantry to pay him off.
- The Power of Love: What Steve says he's testing with Luvactin - the ability of love to make people's lives better and stop people being hurt by loneliness, and the ability to give love to people who cannot love. What he's actually testing - whether or not his obedience drug can overcome the power of love to make someone cause harm to someone else that they care about.
- Queer People Are Funny: Jeff misunderstands the purpose of having him with Rogan, a particularly large and angry fellow inmate, in a test room. He assumes that this is another Luvactin test. This is played for laughs, and when Steve tells him that's not the purpose of the test, Rogan smirks at him and says, "Your loss."
- Questionable Consent: Brought up at several points within the film with various levels of severity.
- The initial setup is described as consensual in that the prisoners applied for and consented to be in the study, and must say the specific word "Acknowledged" before being dosed with any sort of drugs.
- The tests with Luvactin invoke this as it causes several characters to have enthusiastic sex with each other; however they show no interest in each other when the drug is out of their system, and later discuss feelings of shame concerning how they acted under the influence. This is brought up with other drugs (i.e. the Phobica test) in the film as well.
- Steve appears to be friendly with his inmates and describes wanting a relationship of mutual respect. However he also holds power over them as their warden and the person controlling their drug dosages. Made worse by being the person who is creating the tests as well, as the protocol council he refers to as guiding his actions is made up. Most of the inmates are unaware of this.
- Sadistic Choice: Steve gives Jeff a love drug that causes him to have sex with and very briefly fall in love with two different women, and has the two women do the same with a man named Rogan. Then he offers Jeff and both women the choice to give the people they've slept with a torture drug, and asks which one of the two they would rather dose. All of them deny feeling any residual love for each other but also refuse to give anyone else a dose of the drug.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: Steve's love of easy listening music just makes the soundtrack more dissonant as the tests become more destructive and Steve's nature and objective is revealed.
- Source Music: The diegetic music comes from Steve's cell phone, which doubles as his music player and remote control for various actions in the prison. Songs of note:
- Roxy Music, More Than This - played in Steve's room before he goes to bed and takes Luvactin for the first time in the film.
- Tom Dolby, "She Blinded Me With Science" - played by Steve at least once before a test begins. Played by mistake a second time as he is ordering the other inmates to attack Jeff and Lizzy to prevent their escape; the remote is broken at this point and randomly cycling through songs and drugs.
- Poco, Crazy Love - Played by his broken remote while Steve is attempting to escape while high on multiple drugs. The climax plays as Steve, who is currently under the effects of Luvactin, is too struck by a mountain's beauty to save himself from crashing into it.
- Spared by the Adaptation: In the original short story, Jeff performs the titular "escape" from Spiderhead by smashing his drug dispenser implant and getting his body fatally flooded with drugs. In the film, he manages a conventional escape.
- They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!: People keep referring to the warden as "Mr. Abnesti," and he keeps insisting that they call him "Steve." The fact that they don't seems to imply that his Affably Evil persona isn't as effective as he thinks.
- Truth Serums: A drug named Honestease is mentioned briefly in the context of someone being brutally honest, implying that it is a form of truth serum that was tested previously.
- The Unfought: Rogan is established as a hulking bruiser who threw his wife out of an eighth-floor window, and everyone is afraid of him. In the end, Steve sends the whole prison population against our heroes, but Rogan was wearing headphones, so he didn't hear the orders and is absent from the rest of the film.
- Utopia Justifies the Means: Steve believes that his brainwashing drug will make the world better by making people do what they're supposed to do instead of hurting themselves and others, which justifies the suffering and death of his inmates because of his tests.
- Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Subverted. At the end of the final battle, Steve tries to make a run for it in his plane, but because of being dosed with several of his drugs from his earlier fight with Jeff, ends up happily crashing into a mountainside.
- Wardens Are Evil: Steve is not only the lead scientist at Spiderhead, he also runs the place.
