Blending a family can be scary. Residual pains and new conflicts can flare up at the most innocent times. It’s hard enough being a 12-year-old girl, just trying to figure out who you are. Throw in a flesh-eating super-intelligent alien spider, and you’ve got a terrifying recipe. That’s the premise of Sting by horror auteur Kiah Roache-Turner, deftly balancing between family drama and alien spider. Did I mention alien spider? Because who am I kidding? That’s what we came for and he knows it.
It’s terrifying. Best of all, thanks to WETA, it’s also a practical puppet. The digital trickery is in erasing the puppeteers. As a result, most characters’ reactions to it seem pretty reasonable. Except maybe for Charlotte (Alyla Browne), who has a taste for the macabre and at first thinks the tiny spider is cool. For it does start tiny.
But Roache-Turner starts big. An old woman (Noni Hazlehurst) sits watching a horror movie while some horrendous scratching comes from the walls. Getting up to call an exterminator, Roache-Turner makes it clear she suffers from dementia. The noises get louder, but she manages to connect with Frank (Jermaine Fowler). It’s apparent, though, that he’s not the first exterminator she called. Things don’t end well for exterminators.
From the get-go, we’re off-balance. By the time the film winds back four days, we’ve already had a good scare and can slow down. Not that Sting ever slows down. Arriving from space in a tiny egg that breaks through a dollhouse roof, it’s obvious the spider does not have good intentions. When it later unscrews the lid of the jar Charlotte puts it in, we know it’s going to prove it.
At the same time, stepfather Ethan (Ryan Corr) has been bonding with Charlotte by co-creating a comic book. Adolescent outbursts and the shadow of an idealized “real father” keep getting in the way. That and Ethan having to work as the apartment building supervisor in exchange for a cut in rent for his family — and the landlady is his wife’s Aunt Gunter (Robyn Nevin). Bitter because she’s watching her sister Helga slip away, Gunter sees Ethan as a waste of space.
Then this spider starts getting bigger.
For the rest of the building residents, Roache-Turner paints in broad yet specific strokes. We may not learn too much about them, but enough for them to register and in good horror movie fashion, not deserve their fates. Sometimes things get gory, again a tribute to on-set effects. Even the thick viscous webs of Sting (as Charlotte names him after Bilbo Baggins’ sword) are real.
The actors don’t have much time to really develop, but that’s not the focus. There are arcs, and they work, but again — big spider. Not to be confused with a giant spider, though this seems to follow in the hairy padded footsteps of Eight Legged Freaks and Big Ass Spider. It’s not that Sting is huge, but he’s big enough.
If you’re looking for a scary roller coaster ride, Sting is a good bet.
