Crawlers Review (2026 Grimmfest Festival) : Suspenseful Spider Showdown

A beleaguered building manager fights flesh-gobbling arachnids when her dilapidated apartments are quarantined during an exotic spider infestation.

Struggling musician Serena is stuck in a rut, supervising an apartment block for an odious misogynist. When one of the residents returns from a tropical trip, he brings unwelcome guests in the form of voracious spiders with incredibly short breeding patterns. Locked down by the authorities, the residents are trapped inside a crumbling infrastructure with thousands of scuttling killers for company. Serena is resourceful and brave, but she will need the help of a boozy dominatrix to save her building from the sneaky spiders.

Ángel Gómez Hernández delivers his take on the spider-infested apartments subgenre, and it’s a lot of fun. His film sits midway between the serious social realism of Infested (2023) and the B-movie whimsy of Sting (2024). A punchy script and imaginative visuals help its daft premise gain traction, while solid effects and accomplished acting gloss over the plot holes.

The creature design is well executed, even though the creepy blighters seem to be of differing species to suit each set piece. The spider quotient is very high, and viewers get little respite from the hellish onslaught of biting and feasting. Indeed, true arachnophobes will be watching most of the film through trembling fingers and checking their slippers for weeks.

Tension builds through clever camerawork and last-second dodges of fangy jeopardy before unleashing mass attacks of overwhelming swarm and suppress tactics. Both approaches work well with a single spider Mission Impossible type scene, and a claustrophobic lift mauling being prime examples of the two-pronged assault. In terms of horror film dynamics, there is a pleasing balance of death by spider and death by human stupidity.

With so much spidery action to enjoy, character development is at a premium, and the film does well to generate any interactional empathy at all. Especially considering nearly everyone living in the building is a total dick that deserves to have their innards liquefied. However, strong chemistry and a few decent callbacks make the onscreen retributions satisfying and some of the forged alliances relatable.

A welcome addition to the mayhem is the relationship between Serena and Lady Lash, the BDSM beauty from the upper floor. Melina Matthews is excellent as the glamorous mistress with a heart of gold and an overactive drinks cabinet. The repurposing of her kinky wardrobe and paraphernalia as armour and weapons in the fight against the eight-legged legions is both hilarious and weirdly iconic.

Packed with gruesome sequences and scary scurrying, the film delivers on its promise of skin-creeping menace. The gore is nasty, but not so outrageous as to distract from the creature feature frothiness that affords the film its retrospective charm.

Tonally consistent and determined to torment the poor souls who would leap through fire to avoid any skulking house spiders, Crawlers is a fine example of a movie that nails its remit without overreaching.