Crawlers (2026) Review

The tenants at Paradiso Palms apartments have a regular stream of complaints which they have no qualms about aiming at put-upon building manager Serena (Matilda Lutz), whose ideal career as a singer-songwriter seems further away than ever. Dealing with an ever growing list of repairs and trying to limit her interactions with creepy landlord Mr. Rossmore (William Miller), something even creepier is about to prove a greater threat to both Serena and the residents as the building is locked down and everyone is trapped in the place with an infestation of deadly spiders…

Angel Gomez Hernandez’s Crawlers opens with a series of not especially comforting pieces of information, in that for every single person on Earth there are three million spiders, that they are always somewhere in our homes, that we are never more than three feet from one (stop checking behind you) and that if they suddenly decided to eat humans we would all be dead within a year (okay, maybe you should check behind you now). It’s this sort of playful yet chilling attitude which forms the basis of much of the subsequent action.

The roll call of Paradiso Palms residents is dealt with in breezy fashion and those introductions will steer the audience into adding each to the list of who they would want to survive and who they wouldn’t mind being spider food. A lot of them are self-absorbed, full of their own importance who listen to absolutely nothing Serena tells them and are more distressed about the inconvenience of not being able to leave the building for forty-eight hours than any potential danger which might be heading their way. And there’s lots of that, of the eight-legged variety.

The inciting event, in which a professor returns from an expedition and drops dead from the effects of a spider bite, is suitably gross but the emphasis is on entertainment and fun as opposed to making the audience feel sick. Hernandez and writer Jayson Rothwell understand the suspenseful mechanics of having their creatures drift their way slowly downwards towards the top of someone’s head or to move slowly towards a sleeping person’s open mouth and there are a number of near misses before it’s time for the curtain to fall on some of the more unsavoury or irritating characters.

In terms of how suitable this movie is for arachnophobes; it’s obviously not going to be enjoyable for those who freak out at the very sight of one of the little buggers but for those of us who get the ick without wanting to run screaming from the room Crawlers is creepy without provoking much in the way of eye covering. The visual effects for the spiders are fun, if inconsistent, and have more than a touch of the uncanny about them so the sequences never look realistic enough to generate that chill down your spine like, say, the cockroach segment from Creepshow would.

In the midst of this is the affable Lutz, already well versed in the action beats from movies such as Revenge and Red Sonja, even though she’s playing someone with much more of the everyday about her in this setting. The frustrated artist side of her character is a trope that’s been used countless times before but it’s not thrashed in this case, even if most viewers will be waiting to see if the Music Will Save You motto will eventually be deployed in the most literal sense possible.

Most of the supporting cast is disposable for perfectly good reasons, save for Miller as the cartoony Rossmore and Melina Mathews as Lady Lash, an unflappable Brit sex worker with an appreciation for a well-made cocktail and who describes the chaos as a “three martini event” and is deserving of her own spin-off. Having said that, had she been placed in charge of the containment project the entire movie would have been over in twenty minutes.

At well under ninety minutes, Crawlers avoids becoming stuck in the web of dwelling too long on any sequence or plot point and provides more than enough in the way of confrontations and cliff-hanging moments. It’s knowingly daft without abusing the level of ridiculousness and it does have a couple of nice touches of its own, including a nifty piece of anti-arachnid weaponry (which is, of course, ignored by Lady Lash in favour of her own makeshift flamethrower). Unlike the titular enemy, you may see most of the story’s developments coming a mile off but the proceedings are smoothly filmed, attractively designed and Lutz is a main character who’s easy to like, especially as she’s mostly surrounded by such oblivious morons.

Is Crawlers on the level of Arachnophobia? Perhaps not, but it’s a large number of notches above The Giant Spider Invasion. It’s suitably creepy and gruesome when it needs to be and the whole enterprise is delivered with an appropriately irreverent sense of humour. Although it may not stick in the memory for long, it’s a ghastly giggle for a large chunk of its runtime and best enjoyed with a sizeable, enthusiastic audience.

Movie Rating:

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