STING (2024)

Sting (2024)
Directed by: Kiah Roache-Turner
Written by: Kiah Roache-Turner
Starring: Alyla Browne, Danny Kim, Jermaine Fowler, Kate Walsh, Noni Hazlehurst, Penelope Mitchell, Robyn Nevin, Ryan Corr, Silvia Colloca

STING (2024)
Written and Directed by Kiah Roache-Turner
Available to own on Blu-ray and DVD from 19th August 2024

A young girl living with her mother, step-father and baby brother in an apartment block decides to keep a spider she finds as a pet. Unbeknownst to her, this spider is not your average arachnid and soon it grows beyond her control and gets an insatiable appetite for increasingly bigger prey.

“SPIDER!”

Just the shriek of this word will have people climbing onto their nearest sofa or chair, terrified at the thought that one of these eight-legged beasties may spring upon them at any moment, such is the fear throughout the human race. This makes it one of the perfect creatures to build a horror feature around, which is what we have here with STING, written and directed by Kiah Roache-Turner, known for the Australian Wyrmwood series.

When I sat down to watch STING, I expected to walk into Arachnophobia territory, with the much-maligned creepy crawlies to slowly and subtly strike fear in the hearts of the characters and audience alike, but STING is quite a bit different in style to the 90’s favourite. It doesn’t waste time in setting the tone thank to its opening scene of a grandmother named Helga, who suffers from dementia, requesting the services of an exterminator after hearing sounds in the walls. With its swearing, blood-lust and bold scare tactics, this arachnid horror positions itself alongside slasher survival flicks, but with a healthy dose of humour to accompany it, STING presents a fun yet frightening blend for film audiences.

Establishing its camp but impressive horror aesthetic, STING rewinds the clock to several days earlier to show how this fearsome eight-legged creature came to terrorise this little apartment block in the USA. Its otherworldly origins allow for inexplicable and implausible traits – the perfect recipe for any giant creature feature! Focusing on a young girl named Charlotte and her step-father Ethan, who is also the caretaker of the apartment building, we see the loving but slightly strained relationship between the two as he tries his best to earn and keep a roof over their heads whilst pursuing his passion project as a comic book artist. Between his two jobs, he has a family with a young baby to look after and Charlotte, who he loves as his own. Despite his best attempts, Ethan’s feels as though Charlotte doesn’t quite accept him as the father in her life, as she often refers to her absent biological father, even though he tries his utmost to be the best dad he can be, even collaborating on a comic book series with her as the writer. Just as he feels they’re bonding and becoming closer, something seems to put a spanner in the works which knocks their progress back a step which frustrates the stressed-out Ethan. It all seems a bit exaggerated on Ethan’s part though, as from where I was sitting, Ethan’s too sensitive about the situation as Charlotte, for the most part, seems to have a good relationship with him.

Outside of the family relationship drama, there are several other characters in the building we meet, even if only briefly. Maria, an alcoholic widow who lost her family; Erik, a science student whose experimenting with fish; Charlotte’s grandmother Helga, and Helga’s surly sister Gunter, who is also the tight-fisted, bossy landlady of the apartment block. Focusing the action entirely within the apartment building brings a sense of claustrophobia to the whole ordeal, especially when each room is connected by vents of which children and event adult-sized humans can fit and crawl through. This means when the action begins and the spider is on the loose, it could be anywhere!

STING does well to keep the viewer on their toes and the CGI is tastefully done to create this mutant spider. There’s some really great shots of the spider legs creeping around objects and over things, and this is what really sends shivers down my spine, as I pointed out in my Arachnophobia review. It’s the tease of the creature which gets my pulse racing as a self confessed arachnophobe. The fact they have eight limbs and can easily chase after you or, god forbid, jump on you is what really makes me squirm in my seat! As STING isn’t as subtle about its approach, the attacks are bigger and bolder, with the extra-terrestrial element allowing for more unrealistic scenarios. Some of these are shot with spider off-camera, which work very effectively, but also don’t quite strike fear into your heart as much as a spider that is more akin to an arachnid we’d find on planet earth. This element of fantastical brings an unrealness to the proceedings as the spider hunts down its prey like the villain in a slasher movie – only nobody expects to be threatened by a spider of such size!

STING has fun with the familiar spider horror idea as well as playing it totally straight at times. This blend works well for the movie whilst Noni Hazlehurst puts in a terrific turn as the lovable grandmother Helga who is quite oblivious about the eight-legged creature running rampant around the apartment block whilst she’s knitting, watching classic horrors on TV. With young Alyla Browne’s Charlotte as both the person responsible (ish) and the one who discovers the spider’s quirky traits, we get to watch the action play out from her point of view more so than the adult characters surrounding her, which provides an interesting angle for this type of horror.

With some genuinely tense scenes amongst the laughs and absurdness that plays out, STING relishes in where it positions itself between genres, and ramps up the action in the final third that I’m sure even Ellen Ripley would approve of.

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