FROM Australian filmmaker Kiah Roache-Turner, Sting opens strong and closes stronger. It’s the guff in the middle that lets it down.

Alyla Browne - the arresting young star of the first half of Furiosa - is Charlotte, a rebellious 12-year-old, living in Brooklyn with her step-father, Ethan (Ryan Corr), mother Heather (Penelope Mitchell) and infant half-brother Liam. Home’s a wreck, in every sense, and Charlotte often finds herself alone, bored and left to keep herself occupied.

It’s unto this juncture of misery that a mysterious, glowing object crash-lands in Charlotte’s great-aunt's apartment. A spider hatches from within and young, naïve Charlotte opts to keep it as a pet. As the film plays largely in flashback, the first scenes depicting the massacre of an extermination squad sent to eradicate the creature, there’s never any doubt as to where this is going.

Charlotte names her adoptee, Sting, and dutifully cares for him, right up until the point he begins slaughtering her neighbours and their own pets. There’s some neat design work at play here - Sting shares its visual effect producers with the Lord of the Rings franchise - gifting the action pleasingly visceral weight. Genre fans can expect at least some satiation in that.

It is instead the human element that cripples Sting’s sting. All, bar Charlotte, are desperately thin in character and development. There’s little doubting the Spielbergian influence on Roache-Turner’s script but Poltergeist this ain’t. Certainly, it’s hard to care for a family when the pervading sense is that their internal soap is distracting from the fun. More spider, less web wanted.

Also this week, Daisy Ridley leads that woefully titled Young Woman and the Sea. Don’t be put off, it’s a perfectly watchable little biopic.

Adapted from the book by Glenn Stout, and directed by Joachim Rønning, Young Woman and the Sea tells the story of Gertrude ‘Trudy’ Ederle, Queen of the Waves, record breaker and Olympic champion.

In 1926, Ederle (Ridley) became the first woman to swim 21 miles across the English Channel. Nobody believed she could do it - least of all her own trainer, here played by Christopher Ecclestone - but a little thing like that wasn’t going to stop her.

The film was originally destined for streaming but made the big screen leap after positive early test screenings. Trudy still knows how to make a splash.