With Sting, director Kiah Roache-Turner has cobbled together something more modest than his previous genre mash-ups, but just as fun. Combining a creature feature and a family drama, the movie provides a showcase for practical effects from Wētā Workshop where the gooey kills are backed by some emotional heft. It's more high-concept tinkering from the director of the Mad Max-meets-Dawn of the Dead saga Wyrmwood, but here, Roache-Turner shows restraint, letting something smaller and special grow around the pastiche.
And his cast, fully aware of the schlocky terrain they tread, embraces it in a way that adds authenticity to the absurdity unfolding around them. There's a moment where comic book artist Ethan (House of the Dragon’s Ryan Corr) works at his drawing board and in comes his moody stepdaughter, Charlotte (Alyla Browne, playing a character whose name makes sense the second Sting introduces its central beastie). They're collaborating on a new series (she writes, he draws), and it's apparently doing numbers, which is nice, though the project has a deeper significance. As this tender scene deftly demonstrates, the comic is a means to nurture their new, awkward family bond as Charlotte exorcizes personal demons. The main character in their project is based on her absentee biological father, a detail that later affects Ethan in surprising ways.
And yet, not long before the stepfather-stepdaughter-bonding interlude, we watch an exterminator (Jermaine Fowler) get yanked through an air vent by a giant spider in a sequence that pays overt homage to Ghostbusters. (Maybe it's meant to stir Sony into a hiring mood?) Roache-Turner is blending again, playing with tone and emotion, and while that tone might still be tongue-in-cheek, there's an earnestness here that makes much of Sting endearing. Its calibration of sweetly rendered melodrama and monster movie often finds a sturdy balance.
At one point, Ethan asks a creepy science-guy neighbor (Danny Kim) about the arachnid that stalks the cavernous HVAC system of his New York apartment building. "What kind of spider are we talking about here?" The response is succinct and pitch-perfect: "A big one." A giant spider is eating everything with a pulse, and with a cast as small as this one, it's only a matter of time before it comes for Ethan and his family.
Is that all the information we need to tap into Sting’s goofball rhythms? Yes and no. There’s one more wrinkle to this set-up: this spider, which grows alarmingly fast after becoming Charlotte's pet, hails from outer space. The way it enters this complicated domestic situation is chaotic and efficient: One day, a meteorite zips through the window of their building and lands inside a small dollhouse. Out pops the spider, which wriggles through the playset's teensy interiors to the tune of The Pleasure Seekers' garage-rock bop "What A Way To Die" (a riot unto itself). It's there that Charlotte snatches it up.
Having a secret pet helps us better understand Charlotte and the dynamic in this small apartment. Her sense of abandonment gives her a thick protective shell, and Browne is best when she lets that guard slip. So when she mixes it up with her work-at-home mom (Penelope Mitchell) and stepdad, she's nothing but barbs and attitude. Charlotte feels more comfortable in her bedroom, surrounded by comics, crafting supplies, and fantasy. The spider gives Charlotte a sense of personal agency, and she rewards it in kind by giving it a mighty name pulled from The Hobbit, which sits on her well-stocked bookshelf: Sting.
The beast itself is a marvel, in the few moments we're allowed to view it in its terrible glory
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There's a disarming coziness about this film that's easy to appreciate. Its closed-off environment has a relaxing effect – Sting is set during a blizzard, so most of the cast wears awesome grandma sweaters – that’s gleefully undercut by shocks and dread once Charlotte's spider grows to improbable proportions and shows signs of extranormal intelligence. The beast itself is a marvel, in the few moments we're allowed to view it in its terrible glory: Wētā has conjured a monster that is part black widow and part xenomorph, with some of the freakazoid DNA from those giant creepy-crawlies in Ellory Elkayem's Eight Legged Freaks tossed into the mix. Viewed through actively roaming cameras and a heightened sense of reality, Sting frequently gives off the energy of Alien fused with – what else? – Evil Dead.
That's par for the course when it comes to Kiah Roache-Turner. Passionate horror movie fans will recognize and even appreciate much of the visual language he brings to Sting; there's even an added narrative flourish that pays tribute to Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors. However, as Sting's body count and the cinephile allusions pile up side by side, we're left wondering what other famous movies might be on a collision course in a future Roache-Turner project. Maybe they’ll finally meet head on with an idea that's uniquely his?
