As a longtime George Saunders fan, I promised myself that I wouldn’t compare Netflix’s Spiderhead, starring Chris Hemsworth, Jurnee Smollett, and Miles Teller, to the original Saunders story it’s based on. Saunders is one of the strangest, funniest, and most inventive writers of our time, so no film adaptation is ever going to be in the same league as the original, and a comparison feels like it just wouldn’t be fair to the filmmakers. But then I saw a character in one scene reading the real book that contains the story (Tenth of December), which struck me as a plea to remember the cultural cachet the film is latched onto, so screw it, here we go.

The original short story, “Escape from Spiderhead,” is about a prisoner, Jeff, in a facility that tests designer drugs on incarcerated human volunteers. Jeff’s mom has paid a lot of money to get him transferred to this facility after he murdered a guy with a brick to the head, so Jeff’s happy to be here. Things go sideways, though, when Jeff is told to participate in an experiment that starts off cruel and ends up deadly. Presiding over the experiments is Abnesti, who takes orders from his superiors and passes them down to Jeff and the other inmates from his panopticon-inspired control room, nicknamed the Spiderhead.