Sting (2024)
Director (and writer): Kiah Roache-Turner
Cast: Alyla Browne, Ryan Corr, Jermaine Fowler, Nona Hazlehurst, Robyn Nevin, Penelope Mitchell, Danny Kim, Silvia Colloca
After raising an unnervingly talented spider in secret, 12-year-old Charlotte must face the facts about her pet-and fight for her family’s survival-when the once-charming creature rapidly transforms into a giant, flesh-eating monster. – IMDB
Sting is the latest creature feature featuring a fairly underused creature, spiders. Having fairly recently completed the creature feature season on Movies and Tea Podcast and looked at two of these films, the spider world is fairly underused despite having the Arachnophobia remake to look forward to. Directed and written by Wyrmwood director Kiah Roache-Turner, Sting is a more personal journey for the director with both his personal experience as a stepfather and as a person with a fear of spiders making this an interesting territory for him to explore and craft this tale. At the same time, it also sets the story in one location confined inside by a snowstorm.
The film takes place in an apartment complex in Brooklyn spanning over a few days when the creature lands spontaneously into the dollhouse in the grandmother’s home. The story focuses around this family centered around 12-year-old Charlotte (Alyla Browne) living with a newborn baby brother, her mother Heather (Penelope Mitchell) and stepfather Ethan (Ryan Corr). With the building being owned by her grand-aunt (Robyn Nevin) and her fascination to share the vintage things her grandmother Helga (Noni Hazlehurst) owns, she maneuvers the apartment via the vents. The story tries to strike a balance between the struggling family dynamic in Charlotte’s family unit as well as the acceptance of the struggling artist career that Ethan is dealing with which ends up creating a lot of tension aside as the underlying threat, the alien spider ends up growing up under the care of Charlotte. For the most part, the script is fairly well-paced and executed. There are some little bits of the family drama and feel like could be left out for a tighter execution and have more of a focus on the creature feature element however, the film never forgets the core of the film and keeps the creature development as a central plot.
The character dynamics work pretty well also. There are some pretty neat executions and use of the character especially in the starting sequence with grandmother Helga who hears noises around the house and calls the exterminators to end the scene with a well-timed, slightly fourth wall breaking shush towards the audience. Its a nice place to say that Noni Hazlehurst does a charming job with Helga as the aged grandmother who is losing her memory. The same can be said about Alyla Browne who plays as the main young lead as 12 year old Charlotte. Younger roles tend to have the threat of being annoying however Alyla Browne does a great job at maintaining the balance of being a normal 12 year old but also delivering the more emotional elements as she tries to find her sense of belonging in this new family unit. Another wonderful mention does go out to the supporting role as the exterminator Jermaine Fowler who delivers the comedic break in the film that helps tie up where it starts to when the story heads back into the present after it flashes back to how the whole spider situation started in the first place.
The spider design is definitely worth a mention as the director wanted the spider to have a physical presence in the film hence, the spider Sting is a puppet made by 3d printing material and maneuvered by a few puppeteers to make the whole creature move as are the venom spitting capabilities and the webs also implemented physically. There’s something so fantastic about creating a physical creature that makes it all the more believable and it definitely pays off in Sting. The spider scenes are done very well, not only from the element slowly revealing the creature as a whole after its initial size, but also have the growth progress and using the light and shadows to add tension to scenes as it interacts with the cast.
There’s a lot to love about Sting. While the creature feature does try to add in a more personal story element here and at times, it does seem to add more than this film actually needs, there are a lot of other elements that work well from having a great use of the one location concept to building and executing a horrific spider story. To be fair, Sting does have a few minor details that feel like its been inspired by other horror or creature features but in some ways, it does add to the film as a whole. In the world where the eight legged arachnid is not used sufficiently in all its creepy glory, Sting does a great job at rectifying that situation a little.
*Screener provided by Well Go USA*