Crawlers review – killer-spiders movie offers giant-arachnid action alongside anticapitalist commentary

A witty creature feature set in a multi-occupancy building in Los Angeles that takes aim at unscrupulous landlords and finance bros

This arachnid-themed horror is fairly traditional in terms of its structure, core monster threat and scares-to-laughs ratio, but there are a few winningly modern touches. For starters, there is a very contemporary anticapitalist undertow: it all takes place in a single multi-occupancy building (supposedly in Los Angeles, though the whole film was filmed in Portugal) owned by a slimy landlord (William Miller), who rails against the city’s “socialist” local council making it harder for him to rip off his tenants. And the tenants range across the spectrum of income levels and careers, in a way which is directly correlated to how sympathetic they are and therefore how likely to get spider-bit.

So you shouldn’t get too attached any of the characters who work in finance, are “influencers”, or in any way act high and mighty towards the building’s long suffering supervisor Serena (Matilda Lutz), a tomboy-femme girl in shorts and biker boots who is also an aspiring musician. Serena is the one who finds the first victim, a UCLA professor in arachnology who is killed by an exotic spider which grows to extra-large proportions, from a colony ruled by a super-sized queen that appears semi-sentient.

The mid-section is full of teasing interludes in which the audience can see the eight-legged killers creeping up on their blithely unaware victims, who are going about their business as we squirm in anticipation. There is even footage rigged up to replicate a spider’s point of view from inside a bag of crisps that Serena is munching her way through. And some of the lines in Jayson Rothwell’s script (Angel Gómez Hernández directs) are genuinely chucklesome, for instance when spiders accidentally covered in paint are spotted crawling about behind an especially obnoxious content-creator by a user in the chat stream. He remarks that the guy’s art is “moving”, meaning literally so – but the creator just takes it as a compliment. Trust us, it’s funnier in the moment.