Spider-Man: Brand New Day Review - One of Marvel’s Most Emotionally Honest Films
The best Spider-Man stories have always operated with the recognition that the line between the hero and the person who needs saving is thinner than either of them would prefer to acknowledge. Director Destin Daniel Cretton, working from a screenplay by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers after his stellar work on Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Wonder Man, has made a film that earns its emotional weight not through the accumulation of spectacle but through the patient construction of the parallel journeys of two lonely people who have arrived at their isolation by completely different routes and who cannot help recognizing each other anyway.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day picks up four years after the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home, and the film does not waste time establishing how Peter has spent them. He has been Spider-Man – fully, completely, and unrelentingly Spider-Man – in a New York that no longer knows Peter Parker’s name. The city loves the hero. No one knows the man underneath the mask. And the man, it transpires, has been quietly disappearing into the gap between those two identities in ways that the film tracks with a specificity and a care that elevates it above much of what the MCU has produced in its Multiverse Saga.
Tom Holland’s performance is the film’s essential foundation, and it is some of the finest work he has done in this role across all of his appearances. Holland has always been best at vulnerability – at making the gap between Peter’s enormous capabilities and his very ordinary emotional needs feel real and specific rather than engineered. Here, asked to play a young man who has been alone for four years in the most thorough and irreversible sense – no friends who remember him, no MJ who knows his face, no Aunt May to come home to – he is extraordinary.
The film’s central conflict is between Peter and Sadie Sink’s character – a young woman who is simultaneously a traumatized runaway seeking something she cannot name and a being of extraordinary power who others would seek to exploit. Sink, who has demonstrated across her career a remarkable ability to play grief and danger simultaneously, is the film’s most valuable asset after Holland himself. Her character is by no means the villain of the film, but rather a person who is, somewhere beneath the damage, reaching for something human. The push and pull between her and Peter – each of them isolated, each of them capable of things that separate them from ordinary people, each of them missing something they cannot articulate – generates the film’s most consistently compelling material.
The film I saw at an opening day ScreenX screening, which wraps the action sequences around the peripheral screens of the auditorium in a way that places the audience inside the fights rather than watching them from outside, demonstrated that Cretton has an instinctive understanding of how to construct action for spatial impact. The sequences involving Peter’s physical evolution – the mutation his DNA has been undergoing, addressed with help from Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner in one of the film’s most effectively deployed supporting performances – are staged with a kinetic inventiveness that the ScreenX format amplifies into something genuinely immersive.
The film’s supporting structure is well-managed without ever threatening to overwhelm the central story. Jon Bernthal’s Punisher returns after his most recent appearance in The Punisher: One Last Kill in a role that is brief but purposeful – a figure whose particular relationship to violence and loss is a reminder that the question of what violence costs its practitioners is one this corner of the MCU is taking seriously.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is, like its predecessors, among the strongest entries in The Multiverse Saga – a film that understands its protagonist well enough to give him not just an adventure but a genuine emotional reckoning with the choices he has made and what those choices have cost him.
With VisionQuest arriving in two and a half months, and Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars beyond that, The Multiverse Saga is entering its concluding arc with this film as one of its strongest recent arguments for why these characters have earned the conclusion being built for them.
The trailer analysis I wrote months ago suggested the film would be about loneliness. It is.
But more precisely, it is about what loneliness does to a person over time – and about the extraordinary thing that can happen when people still manage to find each other across the gulf of it.