Movie Review: STING

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: April 12th, 2024 / 01:03 AM

STING movie poster | ©2024 Well Go USA Entertainment

Rating: R
Stars: Ryan Korr, Alyla Browne, Penelope Mitchell, Robyn Nevin, Noni Hazlehurst, Silvia Colloca, Danny Kim, Jermaine Fowler
Writer: Kiah Roache-Turner
Director: Kiah Roache-Turner
Distributor: Well Go USA Entertainment
Release Date: April 12, 2024

STING is a decent family drama playing out inside a giant alien spider movie. There is a fair amount of overlap in the plotting, especially in the film’s latter portions, but the further we get into it, the more we understand the flash-forward start. Without it, STING would take quite a long time to get to its main horror action.

Directed and written by Kiah Roache-Turner, STING begins with an old woman, Helga (Noni Hazlehurst), who is suffering from dementia. However, she’s not hallucinating when it comes to those noises in her walls. She manages to call exterminator Frank (Jermaine Fowler), who is irked to see another exterminator truck parked out front of the building in South Brooklyn. He comes inside to see what’s going on, an …

Four days earlier, there’s an asteroid cluster that causes an ice storm. At least one of the “asteroids” is actually an alien spider egg. It hatches, and the spider lands in Helga’s dollhouse.

This sequence is actually one of STING’s best, with the spider towering over the dollhouse inhabitants and their furniture, foreshadowing later proportions.

Charlotte (Alyla Browne), Helga’s young granddaughter, is crawling around the building’s vents. She sneaks into Helga’s apartment, finds the at-this-point-normal-looking spider, and brings her home, putting the arachnid in a large jar and naming her “Sting” after Frodo’s sword in LORD OF THE RINGS.

We soon learn the following. Helga’s sister Gunther (Robyn Nevin) owns the building. Charlotte lives in another apartment there with her mom Heather (Penelope Mitchell), baby brother Liam, and stepfather Ethan (Ryan Korr). Gunther has Ethan do the building’s maintenance, but he’s also a comic book artist. Charlotte draws comics of her own.

Ethan really wants Charlotte to accept him as her dad, but she pines for and idolizes her birth father. Heather and Ethan have been keeping a few secrets in that department.

Charlotte does some documentary/Internet research on spiders, and starts feeding bugs to Sting. Sting grows at an enormous rate, and soon is sneaking around the building.

At the risk of sounding like a total spoilsport, Charlotte really ought to guess that Sting is otherworldly much earlier, as she doesn’t put airholes in the jar lid and a normal spider would suffocate. Likewise, for a while, the viewer could be forgiven for thinking there are two alien spiders on the loose – spoiler: there aren’t – because Sting’s jar lid is always back on after a surreptitious raid. Charlotte didn’t do it, and we don’t even know how Sting does.

There is something truly affecting about Ethan’s efforts to connect with Charlotte, and Charlotte’s feelings of alienation from her family also ring very true. Korr and Browne give heartfelt performances.

A lot of people have previewed STING and love its echoes of old-fashioned giant creature movies. It fulfills in that department.

Another perspective is that, unless one suffers from arachnophobia (and plenty of folks do), it is seldom actually scary. The movie also treats terrible pet ownership as humorous, and all the non-white characters are depicted as sketchy and insensitive.

Still, since the only other recent entry in the enormous critters department is the very different GODZILLA X KONG, if you’re jonesing for a stupendous-sized spider saga, STING is here for you.

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