“Seriously misunderstood creatures, spiders are,” declares Rubeus Hagrid in the film version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Hagrid is mourning Aragog, the enormous talking spider that terrified Ron Weasley and was thought sweetly benign by Hagrid. Benign and misunderstood are words that will never be applied to the spider that descends from space to maraud through a New York brownstone in Sting, a terrific new horror movie from Australian writer/director Kiah Roache-Turner.
First off, it should be said that Sting boasts a fabulous opening title sequence. There’s an asteroid shower, see, passing dangerously close to Earth, dangerously close to Brooklyn, to be exact, and as it does, out shoots a tiny Fabergé-esque egg that blasts through an apartment window. The extraterrestrial lands inside a dollhouse, which is actually a model of the pre-war Brooklyn apartment building where the film will take place. A sleek, eager black spider hatches from the egg and begins scurrying about the walls and ceilings of the elegantly decorated model rooms, before setting down on a lovely miniature baby crib. The camera then pulls back to the apartment holding the model, and the movie begins.
The arachnid, which is small (but not for long), dashes onto the hand of 12-year-old Charlotte (Alyla Browne), who’s entered this particular apartment (the landlord’s) via the building’s wide air duct, along which she scurries, unseen by her neighbors, much like her new friend. Charlotte is a bit of a spy. Her route back to the apartment that she shares with her mother, stepfather, and new baby brother gives Roache-Turner a chance to offer a quick glimpse, via air vents, of the other neighbors, an approach at once utilitarian and stylish. Back in her room, Charlotte puts the spider in a jar, feeds it a roach, and is astonished when it kills in a blur of motion. “Cool” she says. She clearly has never seen Alien.
A graphic novel written by Charlotte and illustrated…
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