Crawlers (2026) is an all-too-tempting proposition for a review. You know you needn’t dwell too long on a synopsis: it’s pretty clear what the film is about. But filmmaker Ángel Gómez Hernández understands that we understand what the film is all about, so we can quickly get beyond any distracting complexities and ponder how entertaining or otherwise the end result is. The director knows and we know, and that is fine – it’s like an in-joke between him and us. Quick verdict: if you are happy to park your brain at the door and just get entertained, this is a perfectly enjoyable piece of film with some great little set-ups and imaginative scenes. It’s appropriately gruesome, willing to send itself up and honest about its objectives, and sometimes that’s all you want.
Here’s a possibly unexpected feature, however: Crawlers spends not a small amount of time on class, and how perceptions of class affect what goes down here. We could be bolder and suggest that class somehow extends to the spiders which you already know are about to infiltrate this rundown apartment block: we definitely get boss spiders and worker spiders, but then we also get spiders who seem to have a pretty clear idea of cause and effect, so it’s fair to say this might not be wholly accurate on the whole spider thing. Again, that’s all fine.
But this a digression: back to the rundown apartment block, replete with crooked moustachioed landlord (William Miller) who has a long list of jobs for his janitor Serena (Matilda Lutz, looking like a somewhat steelier Emilia Clarke). He’s off to Aspen (if Serena hears that correctly) so with a certain amount of exasperation, she gets going on what has been set for her, receiving nothing but casual abuse from the other tenants in the block (her own residence in the block is a perk of the janitor job) whilst, we may note, introducing us to a number of potential hazards which may factor in the unfolding story. There are things, apparently, which duct tape cannot fix, including ducts.
The spiders are here, by the way, because one of the residents has just come back from a research trip abroad with an infected bite, which both takes him out and infests the block with a massive amount of creepy crawlies which seem to have a liking for human flesh – starting with his, but quickly moving on to all of the decrepit, groaning vents which connect all of the apartments together, moving into each room and waiting for a feature-length amount of time. By the time word gets out that the block has this issue, the powers that be decide to quarantine it, leaving the residents to their fates, though not reckoning on a plucky janitor who wants to get the hell out of there, even if no one will bloody listen, because she’s a blue collar worker…
Apartment blocks of this kind are often a tempting proposition for a horror film, offering a closed environment which is always horribly inescapable when things start to go down: go on, you can think of several. The space and the premise is used nicely here, with a lot of spiders’ eyes’ views of the feckless humans beneath them, and a lot of near-miss type scenes where people innocently reach their hands into dark spaces.. Once it all starts to kick off, it veers between World War Z-type, mass numbers scenarios and something akin to a Western showdown, but hey – it’s all decently linked together by an appropriate pace and a script which works pretty precisely for what’s asked of it.
Oh, and to come back briefly to the class thing: you know the way you inwardly chafe when people are needlessly rude to service personnel, e.g. the people in society who keep the water and the power on? Yeah, it’s good when that kind of rudeness is rewarded by some horrifying spider action, as well as some glorious set pieces which must have been a lot of fun to storyboard, much less to execute. Crawlers is a decent and enjoyable Saturday night movie which – even if it is under no illusions as to its life-changing qualities or otherwise – does exactly what it sets out to do, and it talks to horror fans on their own level, neither talking down to them/us nor trying needlessly to elevate itself into something else.
Crawlers (2026) appeared at this year’s Celluloid Screams Horror Film Festival.