Anyone utilizing spiders in a horror scenario has an immediate advantage. Spiders have an innate creepiness in how they move, and an alienness about them that makes them immediately unsettling for most audience members. I mean, why do they need all those legs and eyes anyway?
Every spider movie gets this element for free, so it is up to the filmmakers to try for something original. Here the movie fails most egregiously. Elements of this film directly and blatantly rip off the vastly superior Vermines (Infested), including a number of hallway shots, the nature of the spiders’ reproduction and the setting. Spiders infesting a high-rise is far from a unique or original premise, and there are only so many ways to present webs and spiders skittering towards a victim, but there are far too many overt similarities to handwave it as coincidence.
This is where similarities end.
Vermines was good. This is not.
The filmmakers abandon any pretense of subtext or deeper themes in favor of a purely superficial thrill-ride. They likewise remove any of the social commentary or well-drawn characters, instead opting for a cornucopia of Hollywood writer caricatures of what they imagine humans might be. There is a pretty hilarious montage of despicable tenants, like a speed-dating exercise of the most obnoxious and entitled stereotypes of the current age, but dialed up to cartoonish exaggeration. You will quickly root for the spiders, perhaps making an exception for the protagonist as she tries to lead survivors to safety.
There’s little new to see here but enough to make one wince, and likely keep arachnophobes in a state of perpetual tension. You get spiders at every turn and in various sizes, so your particular brand of arachnophobia will likely be satisfied; however, many of the shots drag on uncomfortably long as you wait for the inevitable attack. An advantage to CG spiders is that they’re easy to render, duplicate and composite, so there’s no real need to utilize real spiders like in Vermines if you’re simply making a cheap imitation. There is some rather satisfying gore to offset the hordes of digital spiders, but the severe tonal whiplash that follows is jarring. I will admit to laughing at least twice, once at a particular tenant, and the other when several spiders get painted in a Spider-Man aesthetic. Plus there are entire sequences allowing the director’s barely disguised fetish to play. Unfortunately, this is not funny enough to play as a comedy, not scary enough to play as horror, and clearly not original enough to present as anything but a pale knockoff. Regardless of the number of legs and spiders involved, they cannot carry this film, and the human characters aren’t competent enough to try.