While I respect anyone who looks at a giant spider movie and says to himself, “Yeah, I can do that as an art house horror film”, I’m afraid the results were pretty grim.

The Arbors is about a quiet, shy dude in a small town who discovers a giant spider and quickly forms a hand-waving, vaguely defined emotional connection with it. Or maybe it with him. Who knows. Either way, it kills for him and the folks of the town freak out at a serial killer in the area. The guy can’t (for reasons) fess up to the spider doing the dirty so spends the movie worrying.

And, yeah… this is a movie about a creepy dude who we can’t even feel the remotest amount of empathy for. This could have worked if they had made us feel for the guy’s plight… but I never once really understood why he just didn’t go to the cops. So I was emotionally disengaged from a movie that was trying to be a slow burn. But instead of a burn, it just became tedious and plodding… and then spent the last act forgetting there was a giant spider at all. Probably for hand waving thematic reasons, I suppose, but sometimes your giant spider movie kind of needs a giant spider. I think thems the rules.

Hey, the acting and cinematography are good and I think the director, given other material, could pull something together. But this script and these choices just didn’t work.

Score: 66