****SPOILERS**** Incredibly depressing movie about mental illness from the point of view of the person suffering the effect of it that gives you an insight of how difficult it is to cope with even after years of treatment in a mental hospital.
We first see Mr. Cleg "Spider", Ralph Flennes, getting off a train in London looking like he just survived a train wreck. Having been discharged from the institution that he's been in since he was a little boy, Cleg going to the East London section of the city pulls out of his pants a sock that has all his personal belongings where he has the address of a half-way house that he's been sent to in helping him get back to a normal life.
It's brought out later in the movie that the neighborhood where the half-way house is is also where Cleg lived with his parents Mr & Mrs Cleg, Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson. With Cleg being released to society to begin a normal life we get to see the world from his point of view. Cleg's mind is still traumatized by what happened to him, or what he did, as a boy.
The movie has Mr. Cleg, in flashback, back in his childhood with his parents observing his life with them and the reasons that led him into a life of mental illness and being committed. But what we see is only from Mr. Cleg's unstable point of view and in that way we see how his mind works. We get a very penetrating insight of his mindset by seeing things the way Cleg wants them to be in his distorted vision of reality. We also get confused about what happened until the very end of the film when we see the truth about Cleg and his parents which is a lot different from what Cleg's mind conjured up for him during the movie.
Cleg in his distorted mind tried to put the blame of his actions on his father but you only realized this at the end. With that revelation it brings Cleg as well as the movie audience back down to earth and also for Cleg's part accepting what he did and thus helping him come to take responsibility for it.
"Spider" is not for everyones tastes but if you want to see the inside of a persons mind who's suffering from mental illness and how it distorts his reality and reason and puts him into a fantasy world that he creates for himself "Spider" is defiantly the movie for you to see.
There's good acting by Ralph Flennes as Mr. Cleg and Lynn Redgrave, as the manager of the half-way house Mrs. Wilkinson, and Gabriel Byrne as "Spider's" father Will Cleg as well as Bradley Hall as the young Cleg or "Spider". But the most impressive acting of all was by the gifted Miranda Richardson who played three major parts in the movie so well that I didn't know that it was her in all three roles until I saw the closing credits.
We first see Mr. Cleg "Spider", Ralph Flennes, getting off a train in London looking like he just survived a train wreck. Having been discharged from the institution that he's been in since he was a little boy, Cleg going to the East London section of the city pulls out of his pants a sock that has all his personal belongings where he has the address of a half-way house that he's been sent to in helping him get back to a normal life.
It's brought out later in the movie that the neighborhood where the half-way house is is also where Cleg lived with his parents Mr & Mrs Cleg, Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson. With Cleg being released to society to begin a normal life we get to see the world from his point of view. Cleg's mind is still traumatized by what happened to him, or what he did, as a boy.
The movie has Mr. Cleg, in flashback, back in his childhood with his parents observing his life with them and the reasons that led him into a life of mental illness and being committed. But what we see is only from Mr. Cleg's unstable point of view and in that way we see how his mind works. We get a very penetrating insight of his mindset by seeing things the way Cleg wants them to be in his distorted vision of reality. We also get confused about what happened until the very end of the film when we see the truth about Cleg and his parents which is a lot different from what Cleg's mind conjured up for him during the movie.
Cleg in his distorted mind tried to put the blame of his actions on his father but you only realized this at the end. With that revelation it brings Cleg as well as the movie audience back down to earth and also for Cleg's part accepting what he did and thus helping him come to take responsibility for it.
"Spider" is not for everyones tastes but if you want to see the inside of a persons mind who's suffering from mental illness and how it distorts his reality and reason and puts him into a fantasy world that he creates for himself "Spider" is defiantly the movie for you to see.
There's good acting by Ralph Flennes as Mr. Cleg and Lynn Redgrave, as the manager of the half-way house Mrs. Wilkinson, and Gabriel Byrne as "Spider's" father Will Cleg as well as Bradley Hall as the young Cleg or "Spider". But the most impressive acting of all was by the gifted Miranda Richardson who played three major parts in the movie so well that I didn't know that it was her in all three roles until I saw the closing credits.