Honest Movie Reviews: 'Spiderhead' Is Hemsworth's Budget 'Black Mirror'

In the latest edition of Honest Movie Reviews, we’re pulling together the funniest audience movie reviews on the internet. From funny to ironic, truthful to the downright silly, we’re diving into the deep, dark rabbit hole of online movie fandom. Today, we turn our attention to Spiderhead.

By this point, Netflix has inundated its streaming service with so much original content that it’s difficult to separate the trash from the treasure. While this deluge of content means that there’s always something new to watch, it also means that even the good Netflix movies get lost in the shuffle.

As the director of the year’s biggest hit movie, Top Gun: Maverick, Joseph Kosinski could make any movie that he wants. However, Maverick was delayed for so long that Kosinski had the time to make an entirely different movie for Netflix. The result is his second film in the past month, Spiderhead, starring Chris Hemsworth, Miles Teller, and Journee Smollett.

Based on the story “Escape from Spiderhead,” the story follows a prisoner (Teller) in a state-of-the-art penitentiary who begins to question the purpose of the emotion-controlling drugs he’s testing for a pharmaceutical genius (Hemsworth). The story was originally written by George Saunders, which also appeared in his 2013 collection of short stories, Tenth of December, three years later.

Aside from starring, Hemsworth was also a producer on the film, along with The New Yorker Studios co-producing as well. As with most Netflix originals, Spiderhead received mixed reviews from critics, garnering a 41% on Rotten Tomatoes. Similarly, the users of the platform Letterboxd.com also pointed out that Spiderhead remains a movie that is, in classic Netflix fashion, very middle of the road. Is this just Chris Hemsworth’s attempt at doing a long, deranged pharma bro episode of Black Mirror? Let’s find out.