FILM REVIEW: Crawlers (2026)

Crawlers - New Release Review

Director: Ángel Gómez Hernández

Starring: Matilda Lutz, Andrea Scott Méndez, Isabella Egizi, William Miller

Written by: Jayson Rothwell

Produced by: Brian Crist, Basil Iwanyk, Erica Lee, Alexandra Milchan, Scott Strauss, Josh Weinstock, Peter Weller Soler, Jayson Rothwell

Cinematography by: Pablo Rosso

Original Score by: Jesús Díaz, Roberto González

Synopsis:

Tenants at Paradiso Palms apartments fight a deadly spider invasion while the cunning building manager might be their only hope for survival.

Thoughts:

Is there anything more terrifying than spiders? Well yes obviously there is but still, arachnids of any size and shape and colour have a way of putting the fear into us like no other creature. Perhaps because we all know that our homes are full of them and we only ever see like 1%. 'Crawlers' even warns us that we are never more than 3 feet from a spider. Go on look around, I dare you! And while the film has plenty of creepy sequences it was a big web of disappointment.

Matilda Lutz stars as Serena, the manager of the Paradiso Palms apartment building, who is inundated with complaints from the residents, all of whom are pretty horrible people, about the state of the building. There's no lies being told. The building is in disrepair with an incessant leak in the lobby and other issues. But Serena is doing her best and she's getting no help from the landlord, who has just informed her of rent increases. The job isn't getting easier but it's about to get a whole lot worse when she discovers the rotting corpse of a resident. With his death thought to be related to a virus, the building is shut down, nobody in and nobody out, but Serena and her fellow residents soon find out that it's not a virus spreading inside the building after all...

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The opening scene in 'Crawlers' sets up the fear factor straight away as we see a man with a nasty, oozing gash on his shoulder. He's struggling to breath and looks worse for wear. He eventually collapses in his apartment and a yellowy substance seeps from his bulbous wound. But then something else. Tiny spiders emerge.

There's lots of scenes like this. People reaching into dark spaces with spiders just out of range. People turning around and a spider appears just in the background. The patient build up actually gets a little bit annoying after a while. That could also be because most of the characters featured are all horrendous. We're introduced to some of the residents of the building and none of them, except Serena and Molly, are remotely likeable. As mentioned, there's a lot of near misses with the spiders early on and then kind of all of a sudden we just get a "leader" spider who seems to be controlling some of the other spiders. It was at this point I knew I couldn't take the film too seriously.

Director Ángel Gómez Hernández does a relatively good job at making the early close shaves tense, even making me stir in my seat from time to time. But when he needs to tackle the more extreme stuff it all goes a bit sideways. He elects to include really bad music choices which add nothing of note and some of the weird camera angles were just distracting. Technically the film looks quite good. There's some good lighting and visually the apartment building is interesting, serving up some nice imagery when the horde of spiders begin to attack. But the scares are cheap for the most part and tonally it's difficult to see what Hernández was aiming for.

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Matilda Lutz is good, as always, in fact she's probably too good for this. She plays the entire film very straight while lots of the other actors are "acting" a bit too much. That being said there are some fun sequences and the special effects are quite gooey, which is always a plus. Obviously there is lots of CGI but it's not overly bad.

It descends into a survival countdown by the end and there's a nice little "stinger" just before the end credits kick in but ultimately 'Crawlers' isn't a very good creature film overall and at just shy of 80 minutes the ideas ran out quite quickly.

Verdict: ⭐️⭐️½

-Gavin Logan

'Crawlers' is available on VOD from November 9th and released on DVD on December 7th