What do you get by mixing a New Yorker short story, the writers of "Deadpool," the director of "Top Gun: Maverick" and stars Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller? "Spiderhead" — an intelligent, sometimes moving, sometimes funny sci-fi examination of emotional autonomy amid futuristic pharmaceuticals, until an awkward shift into thriller territory dilutes its purity.
Convicts (played by Teller, Jurnee Smollett and others) volunteer to participate in a study of extremely powerful mood-altering drugs in a remote island facility. Cheerful scientist Steve Abnesti (Hemsworth) runs the place like a summer camp/rehab center where he hopes everyone can be friends. Think of a tall, studly Michael Scott with the power to make you feel anything he wishes. The drugs can make subjects "fall in love," find horrible things irresistibly hilarious, become debilitated with fear or feel the worst they've ever felt. What could go wrong?
The DNA of director Joseph Kosinski's film includes strains of "Brave New World" and other meditations on the intersection of humanity and technology: the kind of fiction that questions how what we feel and what makes us human could be hijacked, enhanced or diminished by science. "Better living through chemistry?" they ponder. There's also a hint of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
