Sting - Blu-ray Review

“Sting,” directed by Australian filmmaker Kiah Roache-Turner, is a film seemingly designed to make you hate spiders even if you didn’t already. It’s basically the “Alien in a ______” formula, with a spaceship replaced by a Brooklyn apartment block, so a bit like the recent “Infested,” only not in French. And while that picture featured an army of spiders, “Sting” is content with just one, albeit a rather large specimen.

Sting is also the name of a spider found in the block by young Charlotte (a brilliant Alyla Browne), who lives with her mother Heather (Penelope Mitchell), stepfather Ethan (Ryan Corr), and her newborn baby brother. She comes across the titular spider while rooting through her grandmother’s stuff after finding her way via ventilation shafts – the film could be called “Shaft” if that hadn’t already been taken. Presumably this is another “Alien” homage? The thing about Sting, however, is that it hatched from an egg that hitched a ride on a meteor that crashed through an apartment window, so it’s not just a spider, it’s an alien spider. That happens to look exactly like a Redback spider (apparently the arachnid that scares Roache-Turner the most).

Sting grows at an exponential rate and learns to take the lid off the jar Charlotte homed it in, which means people start disappearing in a violent and very gooey manner. Inevitably, Charlotte’s parents find out about it and it turns into your average desperate fight for survival that riffs on movies like “Alien.” This movie loves “Alien” (I’m not kidding – Roache-Turner said he specifically picked ye olde Redback because it’s shiny and black like a certain H.R. Giger creation).

As I’ve mentioned, “Sting” is a fairly derivative picture. It also doesn’t have enough meat on its bones to get past that. It’s not as if Roache-Turner—who also wrote the screenplay—doesn’t try, as there’s a subplot about Charlotte not connecting with her stepfather, but even that feels drawn out and like a facsmile of other movies, right down to the revelation that her real dad was supposed to be living far away but is actually only a bus ride away. The thing that really saves the film is the acting, especially Browne’s Charlotte – for a young precocious kid, she is not annoying in the slightest, and her love for Sting is believable, to the point where it should have been exploited more in the final act.

And there’s Sting. Reading interviews with the director, the film is centred around the idea that spiders are horrible terrifying things that will fuck you up. I guess this is a by-product of living in Australia, but it’s such a weird decision to have an alien creature and make it look exactly like a real living animal. It’s petty really. Sting communicates with Charlotte so has a much higher intelligence than your average spider, as well as vocal chords, which spiders do not have at all. I’m biased because I love spiders, but even the shots of Sting, which are brilliantly executed by Weta Workshop as a mixture of animatronic and digital, they feel like the same ones repeated, so it doesn’t ever feel scary. It doesn’t help that Brad Shield’s photography is fairly dark at the best of times.

There’s also another weird subplot with Heather and her mother, who has dementia. While this is used as an emotional line a couple of times, where she forgets that the person helping her out is her daughter, it’s mostly played for laughs and subsequently is quite uncomfortable to sit through. Just thoroughly strange.

“Sting” is a serviceable film at best. Even with all the gestures to horror and science fiction – Heather’s mother and aunt like to sit in the living room and watch classic B-movie genre flicks – it feels like Roache-Turner took the wrong lessons from his influences, ending up in a watered-down version of its ancestors. There are big obvious nods to “Arachnophobia,” “Predator,” and Tod Browning’s 1931 version of “Frankenstein,” amongst others, so if you’re going to reference the big dogs, you need to be doing something more interesting than this.

Audio/Visual

It’s a brand-new picture and it looks and sounds excellent. The squishy sound design is certainly something in the plus column, although I didn’t really notice the musical score at all. It’s up to you on whether that’s a good thing or not.

The Extras

None whatsoever.

Final Thoughts

“Sting” is unoriginal and the few parts that aren’t don’t have much of interest to recommend. The effects are excellent and it’s fairly bloody and gooey, but there’s not much else to go on. Sadly, the sting of “Sting” is weak at best.

“Sting” is out now on Blu-ray from Studiocanal