This was another movie that was pretty much what it said on the tin…but actually, as I was expecting it to be a giant monster movie, it was more enjoyable than I was initially expecting.

The movie starts with an old woman, Helga, hearing sounds in her walls and calling a pest control company. The man she speaks to, Frank, recognises her apartment as one he’s already visited, and asks her about her parrot…to which she responds that she doesn’t own a parrot, and immediately hangs up. As Helga seems to suffer from a form of dementia, though, she forgets that she’s called him…and, indeed, forgets that she’s called another pest company, who were there before Frank was.

After Frank is attacked and dragged away by a giant mutant spider, the movie goes back a few days; to a young girl, Charlotte, who breaks into her grandmother’s storage room and finds a tiny spider in a dollhouse. Unlike me, who’d be running screaming in the opposite direction at a spider like that, Charlotte smuggles the arachnid out of the storage room and decides to keep it as a pet, eventually feeding it enough that it grows at a rapid pace.

I don’t like spiders at all, so most of this movie had me cringing whenever the spider was shown on screen, and that was even before the beast got loose and started terrorising the residents of the apartment building! I did feel that the strongest part of this movie was the relationship between Charlotte and her family. I had some empathy towards Ethan, although his decision to change Charlotte’s artwork made him dip a lot in my estimation. Yes, it’s later revealed that Charlotte’s biological father is a jerk who abandoned her…but speaking as a child of divorced parents, I still loved my mother, despite her flaws. (I obviously love my father, too, but I lived with him, so it was a little different). So yeah, I hd some mixed feelings about Charlotte’s relationship with her step father. I will be honest and say that I didn’t really like her mother, though. Especially when Heather told Ethan she ‘needed that’ about seeing Charlotte and Ethan sitting together while he drew the comics.  At that point, she came across as unbelievably selfish for assuming that the sweet moment betwen Ethan and Charlotte was purely for her benefit.

I liked the fact that Charlotte was particularly resourceful in this movie, and there were some really good elements of foreshadowing throughout. I also really liked Frank, the man who worked in pest control. His presence added some much needed humour into the relatively dark moments during the movie.

I did actually enjoy this movie, all told. It was exactly what it said on the tin, but the characters were ones I liked and cared about, and there were some nice breaks in the tension at times. It’d be interesting to see a sequel to the movie, as I definitely think Charlotte is someone who could grow up to be extremely resourceful/successful…and what if the spider’s mother put in an appearance in the future?

So yeah. Good horror movie. Fairly simple and easy to watch. Would recommend if you’re on the fence about it.