For an Adam Sandler movie, coming directly from Netflix, this is unusually challenging for him and his audience. We know via Uncut Gems that he is more than capable of carrying an entire picture on his own, as also evidenced here, but in the same way that Sam Rockwell needed his clone on Moon and the same way that Tom Hanks needed Wilson, the bobbing volleyball.
Taking the seemingly gilded, cliched rule for cinema that those people that spend alot of time alone eventually become a helpless gibbering fruitcake that talk to fresh air, hallucinations or even sports equipment, it keeps the tension at a knife-edge and the arrival of Paul Dano's chatty arachnid only goes to highlight the wibbly-wobbly lunacy potentially at work.
Ultimately this is a love story after the fact, laced with regret of a life lived in blinkers, taking the intervention of what appears to be a remotely, disaffected third party that is happy to give out marriage counselling at just the time it was needed. How much stock you put in the story beyond the blindingly obvious is up to you, but I would venture to argue that you will never have wanted to hug a big, hairy spider ever before and you probably never will again. Such is the writing here and Dano's delivery of making something so biologically unpleasant, emotionally approachable and tragically accurate.
Many will be bored by a lack of events expected and the action never arrives, nor does it ever threaten to. The adventure is in our protaganists' head. Back on earth his wife, played astutely by Carey Mulligan, has become tired of her husbands' distance, both theoretical and actual, and her refusal to communicate with him makes his apparent unravelling all the more obvious.
Overall, this is a solid effort about the challenges of a marriage and the pitfalls of taking your career too seriously. Delivered well, this is also an unusual approach of addressing a fairly common subject, but no less impressive for that reason. I was entertained throughout and given pause for thought more than once, which I can only hope is a good thing. Worth a watch, but do it with eyes wide open.