The redback spider, also known as the Australian black widow, is the kind of creature that might shake a person’s belief in God. This Lovecraftian nightmare freak hunts its prey with balletic precision and squirts them with organic superglue before injecting them with a venom that liquifies their insides; it then binds the victim in a silk straightjacket so that they’re still alive when the redback drinks their organs. It mostly feeds on insects, but has been known to devour lizards, snakes, and even mice. The spider’s toxin is powerful enough to kill a human being if left untreated, and is especially harmful to small children. The good news is that an antivenom has been available since 1956. The bad news is that people have had ample reason to use it, as the redback thrives in the dampness of modern architecture, and counts mailboxes and the underside of toilet seats among its favorite hiding spots.

In other words, Latrodectus hasselti doesn’t need much of a glow-up to star in a creature feature — it’s already one of the most terrifying critters on Earth. What “Wyrmood” director Kiah Roache-Turner’s “Sting” presupposes is… what if one of these eight-legged killing machines wasn’t from Earth? What if it rode into our atmosphere aboard a comet that crash-landed into a dilapidated New York City apartment building, and was then adopted by an emotionally fragile pre-teen girl who named it after Bilbo Baggins’ favorite sword and thought it was cool that her new pet doubled in size every time it fed, the spider eventually growing large enough for its human prey to appreciate the details of its freaky alien face before it ate them alive? Would that be bad? Spoiler alert: Yes. Yes it would. (Fun fact: Spiders can easily survive impact at terminal velocity, and so the premise of a redback landing on its feet after plummeting from the stratosphere isn’t quite as far-fetched as it sounds).

And yet, the idea of an actual redback spider coming to nest in Eric Adams’ New York is so terrifying to begin with that “Sting” doesn’t have much to gain from its extraterrestrial twist. As a Brooklyn-based arachnophobe who lives in a more realistic version of the homey but sprawling apartment set that Roache-Turner and his team built in downtown Sydney, I was much twitchier and more unsettled during the first half of this movie — when Sting is hiding in kitchen cabinets and what not — than I was during the second half, when Sting is clambering through the building’s air ducts like an 18-wheeler trying to squeeze through the Holland Tunnel. There’s decent fun to be had in this crafty and contained Aussie skin-crawler (a low-budget affair that doesn’t scrimp when it comes to its WETA-created monster), but “Sting” is a bit too small for its massive alien spider to maneuver itself in unexpected ways, and the tender human story that Roache-Turner weaves around her lacks the bite it needs to melt your heart or liquify any of your other organs.

~this review continues on IndieWire~