Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) — a New York City paramedic who grew up in the foster system, resentful of her scientist mother who died in childbirth spider-searching in the Amazon basin — has found herself propelled into a whole new world following a near-death experience that allows her to see with the grandest of perspective.
The linear if-then we perceive as life has so many more possibilities than we can imagine, and this is the ethos carried by Las Arañas, the spider-people of Peru. Their knowledge changes Cassandra’s life, as well as that of the disingenuous betrayer/murderer (Tahar Rahim) of her mother, whose paranoid fantasies set him on a collision course with the future as contemplated from his combination penthouse/spider grotto. Eventually (like, 20 years later; in this film you only get it in flash-forwards), it all will gift us with several Spider-Women and a “franchise” built on the most tenuous of fine-sanded beaches.
To put it another way: If ever a film could have gotten a standing ovation through carefully repurposed Debbie Reynolds voice work, this is it. There was a moment when I really thought we were going to get a Charlotte’s Web reference, but alas.
Johnson is a fascinating screen presence who has a very specific and unique gift: She can underplay in any situation you throw at her, modulating a performance as it builds to match whatever tone is shaking out in the rest of the film. It’s why she never seems in over her head, even when a film is spiraling out of control, and she’s impermeable to flop sweat. (Just look at the last two Fifty Shades movies, or better yet, don’t, and just check out the better-than-it-needed to be first one.) If you’ve not been privy to the surreal press tour for this film, Johnson has proven peerless in the ability to transcend even the most banal of interview situations just through force of will and elusiveness of spirit.
Maybe she leveled up and got Hollywood superpowers with the “actually no — that’s not the truth, Ellen” moment that changed an entire career’s dynamic, but Johnson is a singular presence that cannot be tripped up by a bad movie. But despite what the poisonous advance word on Madame Web would have you believe, it’s not a bad movie. “Morbius was better,” someone said, which is utterly insane — the kind of verbal gloved slap designed for maximum hateration and social media engagement but that has no root in actual reality. Though Madame Web shares half of its screenwriting team with its aforementioned 2022 sibling, there are some actual, relatable human moments that strike a chord that you rarely get in comic book cinema. Universes don’t get shaken, and grand schemes don’t unfurl with maximum digital kaboom, but a put-upon civil servant gets a moment of maximum cosmic clarity that makes you feel something besides the one-two continuum span of awe and annoyed ennui that seems to be where the modern superhero goalposts have been set.
Madame Web is in no way concerned with multiverses and whatever the MCU is currently developing during its protracted treading of water, and that’s got to be annoying for some viewers. But aside from its truly forehead-slappingly awful first three minutes, this is no more egregious than any other of these movies, and occasionally delivers something special, more often than not due to Johnson’s unique presence. That, and Adam Scott delving into his Hellraiser: Bloodline ability to waltz around the sweatiest of IP demands. And just so you know, a 4DX ticket is cheaper than half an hour with a chiropractor and will also get you similar short-term results.*
*Jason Shawhan is a film critic, not an osteopath.
