Sting

 

Sting

Writer & Director ~ Kiah Roache-Turner

2023, Australia-US

Stars ~ Ryan Corr, Alyla Browne, Noni Hazlehurst, Jermaine Fowler

 

The trailers gave away too much instead of capturing the true mood, that of a likeable but unchallenging creature feature. With a whacky-adjacent credits opening, broadly drawn secondary characters living in the infested apartment block, the vibe is more ‘Troll’ or ‘Critters’ than the recent ‘Infested’. Yet the family trouble feels very contemporary, what with a bratcocious girl and her beleaguered, belittled artist stepdad. Both Alyla Browne and the film play Charlotte (!) as one of those kids that has grown up the end result of a particularly cloying promotion of self-determination, which thoroughly works for her in ‘Furiosa: a Mad Max saga’ but is more annoying here. Ryan Corr plays Ethan the stepdad as from a more earnest family drama. It’s their story, Sting the spider growing as a manifestation of Charlotte’s unruliness and underlying anger and of Ethan’s sense of the small world around him as constantly antagonistic.

 

It's a average domestic dysfunctional dramatics and all it takes in the spider invasion to put things right. There’s a lot of scuttling through surprisingly clean air ducts by both girl and spider but surprisingly little creepiness or scares. Rather, the scene stealer is grandma with the memory loss (Noni Hazlehurst), and the most achieved dark humoured moment belongs to her at the very beginning. There’s a comic book feel, some decent WETA effects, but ultimately feels undercooked.

 

 It’s undemanding and underachieving, unpretentious and mostly just diverting.