Originally published in The New Yorker in 2010, “Escape from Spiderhead” is about a group of prisoners living in a specialized facility who are being subjected to experimental mood-altering drugs, with names like Verbaluce, which makes you speak eloquently, and Darkenfloxx, which makes you feel about as badly as a person can feel. But stranger things have worked for the streamer and who doesn’t like a slick, dystopian sci-fi? So it’s an especially bold leap to use it as the inspiration for a starry, big budget, Netflix-subscriber-driving event movie, as they’ve done with “ Spiderhead,” which starts streaming Friday. It’s the kind of subtly unsettling work - stark, moody and dialogue heavy - that could easily be a play or a haunting experimental film. George Saunders’ short story “Escape from Spiderhead” is not, you might say, an obviously cinematic piece.
