A rebellious girl finds a tiny spider in her rundown apartment building. She keeps it in a jar, but it soon starts to grow at a monstrous rate and develop an insatiable appetite for blood. As her neighbors begin to disappear, the girl and her family find themselves in a desperate fight for their lives against a ravenous arachnid with a taste for human flesh. A film by Kiah Roache-Turner, starring Ryan Corr, Alyla Browne, Penelope Mitchell, Robyn Nevin, Noni Hazlehurst, Silvia Colloca, Danny Kim, and Jermaine Fowler.
STING
Kiah Roache-Turner
(2024)
During the worst ice storm in United States history, an asteroid cluster passes close to Earth’s orbit. A tiny meteorite falls into a storage room in a rundown NYC apartment building, breaking through the window and landing on a dollhouse. The pod-like meteorite opens, and a spider-like creature, similar to an Australian redback widow, crawls out of it.
The name “Redback spider” comes from the distinctive red, orange, or brownish stripe found on the abdomen of the female Redback spider. This marking gives the spider its characteristic appearance and serves as the basis for its common name. The Redback spider is a species of venomous spider indigenous to Australia. The venom of the Redback spider is a neurotoxin called latroxin, which can cause intense local pain, sweating, muscular weakness, spasms, nausea, and vomiting. Female Redback spiders will cannibalize on other female Redback spiders and even eat their own offspring if they get too hungry.
Rebellious young Charlotte (Alyla Browne) sneaks into the storage room through the building’s vent to take a picture of a creepy old doll and post it on her Instagram. There, she finds a tiny, glistening spider and decides to bring it back with her. When Charlotte hears the voice of her witch-like aunt Gunter (Robyn Nevin) closing in, she quickly crawls back into the vent from where she came. The storage room appears to be inside an apartment of her dementia-stricken grandmother Helga (Noni Hazlehurst).
Charlotte is also the name of a character in E.B. White’s 1952 beloved classic children’s book Charlotte’s Web, a heartwarming story of the unlikely friendship between a livestock pig named Wilbur and a barn spider named Charlotte.
Gunther unlocks the storage room door and finds nobody inside. However, she notices a hole in the window and another in the dollhouse. She then confronts Charlotte’s stepfather Ethan, accusing him of Charlotte damaging her stuff, which Ethan denies. Gunther then commands Ethan to fix the broken window, despite Ethan telling her that he is very busy fixing the boiler, the garbage compacter, and a tenant’s sink. Gunther reminds him that he must do what he is told, since it was she who gave him this building supervisor job and let him stay without paying any rent.
Charlotte names her new spider pet, “Sting,” inspired by the Elven short-sword from her beloved J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. She keeps Sting hidden from her family and secretly feeds Sting with cockroaches. She teaches Sting to mimic her whistle—signaling when Sting is hungry and needs to be fed.
Sting quickly grows bigger and smarter, unscrewing the jar lid to sneak through the vent and kill Gunther’s parrot. It then returns to the jar as if nothing happened. Charlotte doesn’t have the slightest idea of what Sting is capable of. Gunther calls Frank (Jermaine Fowler), the exterminator, to deal with what she believes to be rats that killed her parrot. Frank, however, doesn’t think it was a rat. Frank sprays pesticides throughout the entire building, except for Charlotte’s room because she asks him not to.
Written and directed by Australian filmmaker Kiah Roache-Turner, STING is a horror film about an alien spider we never knew we needed. The film leans quite heavily on family drama, which might be the least interesting plot point for some viewers; after all, most would be eager to see the alien spider story unfold.
I love how the filmmaker withheld revealing the alien spider’s appearance, at least in the first 30 minutes. This creates a sense of something dark and sinister lurking in the shadows. The visuals are effectively visceral, with blood splatter, gore, and all, heightening the overall atmosphere despite some unnecessary jump scares.
STING was theatrically released in the United States on 2 April 2024.
