In ‘Sting,’ a 12-year-old girl discovers an extraterrestrial spider, leading to deadly chaos in her Brooklyn brownstone.
By Sarah G. Vincent/Boston Movie News
Twelve-year-old Charlotte Krouse (Alyla Browne) resides with family members and tenants in her great-aunt’s Brooklyn brownstone building. After an asteroid shower, she discovers an extraterrestrial spider. “Sting” refers to “The Hobbit”-inspired name that she gives her eight-legged guest. Over four days, animals and people start to die as the spider grows. Sting would not turn on her human benefactor, would she?
Charlotte’s name is probably an allusion to the benevolent spider in E. B. White’s beloved children’s novel. This Charlotte is an adventurous girl who prefers to mutilate dolls rather than play with them, which explains why Sting does not repulse her. She is also a lonely girl who feels a little lost in the hurly-burly of quotidian life and seeks connection. Her mom Heather (Penelope Mitchell) and stepdad Ethan (Ryan Corr) work from home and just had a baby, Liam, so they cannot give her as much one-on-one attention as they did before, especially Ethan, who moonlights as a comic book illustrator and animates Charlotte’s story ideas.
A dynamic on par with the 1986 film “Labyrinth” develops between Charlotte and her little brother since she resents babysitting him, preferring to stay in her comic fantasy world. Like Sting, she lurks in the vents, watches people, furtively enters spaces, and enjoys subverting expectations through some anti-social behavior. By dabbling in mildly aggressive pastimes, which include watching Sting feed on live insects and imagining her comic, vampiric-like avatar, Fang Girl, accidentally killing her relatives, “Sting” implicitly questions how Charlotte will react when she discovers that Sting is killing more than just roaches.
Meanwhile, Ethan faces mounting pressures: pursuing his dream career, juggling his duties as the building’s live-in superintendent, adjusting to fatherhood, and navigating the complexities of his role in a blended family and creative partnership. “Sting” hints at Ethan’s potential paths: embracing family, succumbing to selfishness, or becoming a family annihilator. As Ethan’s drinking escalates, so does his hostile behavior whenever he hits a roadblock. After Heather and Ethan have a tense conversation, Sting wreaks havoc and leaves the family room in disarray as if there was a violent struggle. Although Charlotte has not been keeping track of all the weird disruptions, when she finds the empty, disturbed room, she immediately concludes that her spider, not Ethan, is the cause. Ethan makes more sense since he just broke their flat-screen TV in frustration over the reception, which is as turbulent as the snowstorm outside.
Australian writer and director Kiah Roache-Turner ventures into more nefarious themes and then skitters away as if his imagination frightens him. “Sting” opens with a dementia-stricken woman, Helga (Noni Hazlehurst), calling an exterminator Frank (Jermaine Fowler), who adds comedic relief. Because her memory is unstable, it leads to a provocative potential for Helga to provide a steady stream of unintentional human sacrifices, which will keep her safe from becoming arachnid-chow but will only exacerbate the killer creature problem. There is also the added tension of having an Etch-a-Sketch witness who cannot call for help because she confuses the chaos in her home with the black-and-white horror movies that she watches. Roache-Turner is great at setup but does not sustain interest or fully develop a concept.
A couple of fellow tenants seem like more than fodder in this creature feature but never get a full chance to shine for more than a few brief moments onscreen. The colorful, affable Maria (Silvia Colloca) is a self-medicating alcoholic with a traumatic past, which is never elaborated. Maria functions as a portentous warning to Ethan of his future if he does not appreciate his family. Biology student Erik (Danny Kim) is a monotone figure who might be a responsible adult or a mad scientist in his self-funded home lab. Erik treats Charlotte like an adult when she comes to him for help. He has some of the most interesting scenes because he is an unexpressive character who behaves unpredictably. Roache-Turner skillfully tells the story from the perspective of domesticated animals, particularly Maria’s charming chihuahua, Bonnie, the standout character. Through ground-level shots, Roache-Turner portrays Sting’s disturbance of their sheltered environment, devoid of predators but filled with adoration. Bonnie is unprepared for the wild, but she rises to the challenge. With her common sense, she would ensure everyone’s safety despite her frustration trying to get people to understand her barks. There must be an offscreen scene where she figures out how to use her paws to open the vent to get help!
The narrative rushes through storylines and drags to the denouement, with the attacks becoming monotonous. As the body count mounts and affects people outside the building, it strains the suspension of disbelief that no one would figure out what is happening, even during a winter storm. Instead, the formula becomes repetitive: Sting infiltrates and exits enclosures, preys on the unsuspecting, startles, captures and kills them. Rinse and repeat.
During the first human kill, Roache-Turner delves into the nitty-gritty, grisly logistics of how an alien spider would attack, but it is not until the denouement that he gives viewers a bird’s-eye view of what it is like to be stuck in Sting’s pantry. The effects of paralysis seem to vary depending on the character’s role in the narrative’s trajectory to strengthen the family’s bonds.
“Sting” is the first time that Roache-Turner set one of his feature films in the U.S., and Brooklyn is a great choice. His cast is more diverse than the average Woody Allen film, and the location gives him an excuse to isolate a group of people, which would be less likely in a spacious country like his native Australia. He does not understand that it would require a blizzard of the century to stop people from traversing the streets.
However, the innate horror of spiders transcends country borders, and “Sting” is only the first movie in a resurgence of horror movies with spiders as the source of scares. Another foreign film, the French “Infested,” will be coming to theaters later this month and will easily eclipse its Australian counterpart on every artistic and entertainment level. Both films confine the action to a single building, which supplies a greater concentration of people than a standalone, single-family home could provide. The foreignness of the spider is an essential element. The denizens underestimate the problem by mistaking its identity for a harmless, domestic counterpart, a fatal error. Few notice the difference between an ordinary creature versus a threatening species until it’s too late. Soon, homes become battlegrounds for survival. Roache-Turner does not use foreignness to encourage xenophobia subtly but as a symbol for misplaced love and attention, which puts a wedge between relatives. The helpful domestic dweller that eradicates pests becomes an unnatural, deceptive, and sinister occupier, supplanting the rightful dwellers under the false allure of representing what they most desire instead of appreciating what they have. Once the threat is assessed, it can also be a unifying force to bring them together.
“Sting” remixes “Little Red Riding Hood” with a Wolf spider twist. The woodcutter is a stepfather using broken equipment in a rundown building. Charlotte’s red hoodie is reminiscent of the classic tale, and her maternal family seems as if they come from Germany. The denouement feels like an earthbound, basement homage to 1986’s “Aliens” with Ethan playing Ripley and Charlotte as Newt. The film’s tone feels a little dated, like a television movie from an era when tube TVs existed, so moviegoers may want to go to a matinee showing or leave disappointed.
‘Sting’
Rating: R for violent content, bloody images, and language
Cast: Alyla Browne, Ryan Corr, Penelope Mitchell, Noni Hazlehurst, Jermaine Fowler, Robyn Nevin, Silvia Colloca, Danny Kim
Writer-Director: Kiah Roache-Turner
Running time: 91 minutes
Where to watch: In theaters April 12
Grade: C
Sarah G. Vincent is a freelance film writer who writes for Cambridge Day, In Between Drafts, and sarahgvincentviews.com, her blog. She is a regular contributor on WGBH News’ Morning Edition and has made guest appearances on NECN/NBC 10. She is a Tomato-approved critic and a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics. She is originally from NYC and was introduced to repertory cinema while working at the Harvard Film Archives.
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