User Reviews

After glancing over some the previous comments for Spider (2002), as well as several other somewhat similar films that explore various comparable themes, I have come to the conclusion that audiences today don't want to be challenged. A sad fact indeed, since David Cronenberg's Spider is one of the more challenging English-language films of the last couple of years. Told in an entirely subjective fashion that owes much to the work of writers like William S. Burroughs, Franz Kafka, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the film draws the audience into the lead character's mind and leaves them there to wander through a wavering maze of fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, the conscious and the subconscious, etc. The symbolic side of the film sees Cronenberg at his best; rejecting the adolescent sex and violence of his earlier work and instead building on the same highly psychological mind-space previously explored in his 1988 film Dead Ringers. There's also a certain reminiscent feeling to his two controversial literary adaptations of the 1990's, Naked Lunch (1991) and Crash (1998), both of which depicted a world as viewed through the eyes of a tormented character.

Cronenberg has always enjoyed chronicling the downward spiral of characters that have been psychologically damaged, but with Spider, novelist Patrick McGrath has created one of the ultimate cinematic schizophrenics. From his over-sized shoes, to his nonsense book of gibberish, Spider is every rambling lunatic we've ever come across rolled into one. In lesser hands, the performance could have very easily veered towards Rain Man territory; however, with Fiennes in the lead role, this was never a danger. Having exorcised all traces of hammy overacting as The Tooth Fairy in Red Dragon (2002), he is here free to create a subtle, less showy role that requires little besides simply 'reacting'. His appearance is one of outright dishevelment throughout, as he sits in smoky canteens decked out in a dirty rain-coat, scruffy trousers and with bright yellow nicotine stains on his fingers. If we could walk into the film, we get the feeling that the stench of urine would be everywhere.

When not chronicling the darker side of mental illness or the terrible living conditions of the British halfway-house system, Spider works best as a gripping detective story. We, the audience are here to follow Spider as he traces his various webs back to that one fateful night; studying the facts and putting the pieces back together. There is even a semi-nonsense voice over/stream of conscious thought pattern mumbled by our 'hero' throughout, which helps shed some light on the mystery at hand without necessarily giving too much away. The film also works as a showcase for underrated actors. Fiennes, of course, in the lead is outstanding, but we also have Miranda Richardson as young spider's mother, as well as acting as the film's central enigma. Some have criticised her performance as being almost larger than life, like a caricature, but she is supposed to be playing the fevered incarnation of womanhood as depicted from the mind of a very troubled boy; so what do you expect? As mentioned before, the film works from an entirely subjective viewpoint, in which everything in the film has been rearranged and re-adapted to better suit the crumbling mindset of the central character.

With this in mind, Cronenberg creates a depiction of Britain that has more in common with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) than anything resembling old London town. There are no cars in the film and, save for a few scenes, very little in the way of extras. This allows Spider to wander the empty streets and empty allotments as if constantly roaming around his own damaged and alienated psyche. Gabriel Byrne is also interesting as Spider's father, but his performance is one of great subtly. Even more subtle and criminally underrated is John Neville as Spider's only companion in the halfway house. He gives a very restrained, understated portrayal of psychosis and old age, which is both intriguing and disturbing; with many viewers picking up on the circular thematic of these two different characters. Is Terence a prototype for Spider? Perhaps. Even more intriguing is the character of Mrs Wilkinson, who may or may not be the very same woman who initially flashes her breast at young Spider, thus triggering the events of the film. If she fails to register, it is perhaps down to the streamlining of the character from book to film, which will inevitably leave out major plot details.

Regardless, Cronenberg ties all of these ideas into the images of the film; creating frames of Kafka-like complexity, with damp, bleak, washed-out scenes brimming with symbolism. Try and count how many times we see Spider framed through bars and grates, or how many times the web symbolism is used. The obsession with gas is also a clever allusion to later events and wonderfully represented by the looming gasworks that linger constantly on the horizon. This is a film that rewards multiple viewings, and, as a fan of engrossing, suspenseful, intelligent cinema, I greet it with open arms. Some will no doubt find the film to be a real chore, while others, I would hope, might find something to enjoy within this dark and troubled story. Sufficed to say, for those willing to allow themselves to be tangled in the spider's web, the film will reward....

'Spider (2002)' strikes me as a very uncharacteristic David Cronenberg film. Entirely absent are the graphic splashes of "body horror" for which the Canadian director is famous, replaced instead with another facet of the human condition: the mind. Though I went into this film expecting a thriller, it was really nothing of the sort; 'Spider' could more accurately be described as a slow-burning psychological thriller, surprisingly low-key by Cronenberg standards (think along the lines of Brad Anderson's 'The Machinist (2004)'). However you categorise it, I very much enjoyed this moody tale of a recovering mental patient, Spider (Ralph Fiennes), who begins to revisit the events – real and imagined – of his childhood. Ralph Fiennes, one of his generation's finest actors, does an extraordinary job of carrying the film in an almost wordless role; his dialogue is largely restricted to feverish, incoherent ramblings, but there's torment behind his every gesture and syllable; even his staggered gait is pitiful to watch.

2002 was a good year for Fiennes, who also played Francis Dolarhyde in the underrated Hannibal Lecter prequel 'Red Dragon (2002)' {yes, you'll also find him in 'Maid in Manhattan (2002),' but every man is allowed one mistake}. Miranda Richardson, in dual (and later triple) roles, undergoes a remarkable transformation as both Spider's beautiful housewife mother, and the vulgar tart who seemingly replaces her. So convincing is the shift in persona that, quite honestly, I didn't realise the two were played by the same actress until I watched the DVD special features afterwards. Gabriel Byrne has stated that his own role, as Spider's father, was the most difficult in the film, and you can see where he's coming from. Bill Cleg must project two personalities simultaneously: that of an overwhelmed working-class father perplexed by his son's mental illness, and that of a malevolent and murderous drunkard, the latter a fabrication of Spider's disturbed young mind.

Dennis Clegg is in his thirties and lives in a halfway house for the mentally disturbed in London.

Dennis, nicknamed "Spider" by his mother, had been institutionalised with acute schizophrenia for some 20 years.

He has never truly recovered, and as he begins to remember his past, people around him vicariously experience his increasingly fragile grip on reality.....

For a Cronenberg film, it's a very different path the director has taken, it's probably one of the most narratively straight forward films he has made during his illustrious career.

You could view it as Cronenberg does a Kitchen Sink Drama, or the most depressing episode of Mr. Bean you could ever wish not to see. But the last comment would be totally unfair on Feinnes, because he puts in wonderful, almost muted performance as the titular character.

The past is most definitely the most interesting part of the film, as the story centres on Dennis's dad, played wonderfully by Byrne. Fiennes may put in a wonderful performance, but Mr. Clegg is most certainly the most interesting, fleshed out character in the film, and sometimes it feel like Spider is only featured in the film so we can follow Mr. Cleggs arc feasibly.

Mr. Clegg is sadly facing midlife crisis, slowly coming to the understanding that this is his life, and this is how it's going to be for a very long time, so he begins an extra marital affair with what appears to be a doppelganger of his wife, played brilliantly by Richardson.

And this is where the film gets interesting as we begin to realise that What's affected spider is something that he saw from his bedroom window, something that all children dread to see, Their parents being amorous toward each other.

This is where the film asks the question, Is Mr. Clegg having an affair, or are the couple simply spicing up their personal life, and the scene at the allotment is nothing more than a metaphor for saying goodbye to the old life.

But obviously Spider's fragile mind id seeing it from the former perspective, and his mother is no longer the innocent angel he once saw her as, but as a totally different person, thanks to that few seconds when he saw her with his dad.

It's very Freudian in it's nature, and it does take a lot of patience, but Cronenberg has made a wonderfully subtle film.

Spider is a mentally unstable man who has recently been released from an institution to a lodging-house in London. As he wanders, memories of his childhood in a repressive family home return to haunt him, and he must confront the demons of his past.

This is easily Cronenberg's most obscure film, funded by several arts groups (and with no less than nine executive producers), and is an intense psychological period piece, like his earlier M Butterfly. Whilst it may lack the suspense and visual excess of some of his more famous films, it's nevertheless a brilliant character study and a gripping exploration of Oedipal psychosis. It daringly takes a conventional murder plot (a man kills his wife when she discovers him with another woman) and then exposes it as a fantasy in the mind of the audience. Better yet, it presents two very different characters (both superbly played by Richardson) and fuses them into one, forcing us to see her from the unhinged Spider's point of view. I have two problems with this movie though. The main one is that it's very slight; it doesn't really have enough material for a feature, and could probably be done even better as a short film. The second is that I don't care for Fiennes as an actor - he's too fond of nuance and mannerisms - in this respect this is the perfect role for him, all ticks and mumbles, holding roll-ups the wrong way round and hunched scribbling. Richardson however proves yet again she's probably the finest British actress working (for more of her, check out Empire Of The Sun, The Crying Game or Sleepy Hollow), and Byrne and Neville are excellent. Technically the film is superb, filled with visual metaphors, careful editing and decayed design, sort of Psycho meets Franz Kafka. It also plays very cleverly with perception - almost every scene involves either the boy Spider or the man Spider or both watching the action, and the role of the voyeur (him and us) is of central importance to the narrative. A difficult movie to be sure, but a rich and rewarding one for the open-minded viewer. Adapted for the screen from his novel by Patrick McGrath.

A lot of the good reviews of this movie keeps accusing me of not wanting to be challenged and just wanting a good flick. I guess "challenged" means watching the whole movie through without falling asleep? The story is pretty simple, boy believes his mother is replaced by a prostitute and kills the prostitute but oh wait it was just his mother. The only question raised from this is if the trauma made him go insane or if the insanity made him experience the trauma (as stated by another reviewer). Other than that its not really that challenging. Characters are introduced but not developed, and a film that could have been interesting dragged on.

Spoilers

SPIDER is a micro-movie (few characters, claustrophobic setting, etc) that is just too simple for its own good. The really amazing thing about it (positive or negative, you pick) is that nothing happens for one whole hour. I looked at the vcr display and it showed 59 minutes and NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING happened yet. Phew! Ralph basically is basically a mute, so don't expect him to utter any dialogue. Nothing happens in the present. Most of the drama occurs in the flashback scenes, when Spider is a kid. And this is when and where the film fails.

The little kid was a good actor but because almost all of the drama occurs in the mind of someone who's a schizophrenic, we don't really know what's real and what's the product of the kid's imagination. The crux of the story is about sex (of course) and it's WAY too simplistic: the kid goes to pub to tell his father that supper is ready. In the pub, the kid meets this scary tarty woman, who shows him one of her breasts. This terrifies him. When later on the boy sees his mother in her slip, he suddenly gets aroused but when his mother catches him staring at her, he's shamed. From this point on, we're dealing with the kid's schizophrenic imagination: Spider is so ashamed that he was caught looking at his mother in a sexual way that he imagines his mother is now the tarty woman. He does this by imagining his father having an affair with the tart (the mom and the tart are both played by Miranda Richardson) and imagines his father killing his mother, only to have her replaced by the scary tart. Spider's burgeoning puberty, mixed with schizophrenia (caused by the fumes from the gas plant?), makes him see his mother as the tart, not the sweet gentle mother he knew before his hormones took over him. So when he eventually decides to kill the tart, in the end, Spider actually killed his mother, because the tart never lived with his father. That's what the adult Spider realizes when he was about to kill Mrs. Wilkinson, who, like his mother, had suddenly turned into the tart and when Spider was about to kill the tarty version of Mrs. Wilkinson in her bed, he found the real Mrs. Wilkinson (played by Lynn Redgrave) there and not the Mrs. Wilkinson played by Richardson. Wow. How simple! Spider goes back to the big house, just like where he was before the start of the movie, before he was released to the halfway house.

Because we can't connect with Spider as an adult, and because we can't connect with Spider's past because most of it is imaginary, by the end of the movie, I was pretty much indifferent towards everything.

The whole film is still admirable but it is way too simplistic AND predictable. Nothing much happens and it's remarkably slow! The really good thing in SPIDER is the look and production design. I loved it. I was so immersed in it that when I stopped watching the movie, I felt that I was still in it (I watch the film on a very dark and rainy afternoon). But as far as the film's story, well, it was too minimalistic and the mobius strip storyline (you can imagine Spider repeatedly going back to and out of the halfway house over and over again as he goes over the murky details of the death of his mother) that it's just not enough for me to say that it's great or even successful, as a drama or even as a symbolic work of art.

David Cronenberg's "Spider" is a kind of antidote to the upbeat depiction of madness found in last year's "Beautiful Mind." The latter ends with the crazy man turned into nothing more than a slightly befuddled genius, receiving an honorary delayed Premio Nobel with his loyal wife beside him. Spider ends with the isolated, pathetic Dennis Cleg ("Spider," Ralph Fiennes) being taken from a grim halfway house back to the asylum from which he came. He has not worked out, to put it very mildly.

The "Beautiful Mind" character, John Nash, achieves a semblance of normality. Insanity is something he pops in and out of, like a computer game, and resolves to turn away from by sheer force of will, no thanks to Ed Harris but very much with the help of a good wife (Jennifer Connelly). Dennis Cleg is utterly deranged. Any sort of wife and any sort of life are out of the question for him and always were as the movie gradually explains to us.

"Spider" is more interior. It makes us focus on Cleg and enter his world by following him off a train to the address he's been sent to stay at. He gets there by a slow stumbling shuffle, muttering to himself, stooping over to pick up tiny objects beside puddles in the dingy gritty London streets of Cronenberg's film. "Spider" is a very creepy picture, and Cleg is a very creepy man. "Spider" works almost entirely without special effects and yet like many of Cronenberg's movies it has a hallucinatory, trippy quality from first to last. Nothing could be much trippier than "Naked Lunch" and "eXistenZ" but what makes "Spider" like an eerie dream is the slowness with which it movies. Spider's shuffle compels us to move with him and into his mind.

Cleg is a very, very odd, withdrawn, strange, almost totally uncommunicative creature, living almost certainly more in the past than the present, inhabiting that past doubly--because he cannot get it out of his mind and it also appears now that the halfway house is very near where he lived as a child and he finds his way back to actual sites of the primal scenes that drove him mad (except that clearly he was always mad, or ready to go mad). He inhabits thus in mind and body now in the hallucinatory scenes of the movie this strange childhood, the world of a boy with a mother (Miranda Richardson) and a father (Gabriel Byrne) in a poor working class house in East London. What is going on? We go back again and again to the same scenes: to a pub where tarts smoke and laugh mockingly, where his dad comes in the evening. To the kitchen where he sits with his mum. He is sent back and forth. His father goes with one of the tarts. The boy follows them.

Or does he? Here as in "Beautiful Mind" the protagonist enters the world of his madness before your eyes, but this time we're not fooled for long. Spider scribbles frenzied notes in a hidden journal, trying desperately, it appears, to figure out what his memories mean. The impossibility of his task is shown in the writing, which is gibberish. He lives with a fearful terror, inside multiple shirts, not daring to look anyone in the eye, but he himself is dangerous and doomed.

The boy Cleg is excellent. Not as mannered and creepy as the adult Cleg (a Beckett figure whose performance, excellently done by Fiennes, is mostly dumbshow), he's nonetheless very much like the older Fiennes in the picture, and the young actor, Bradley Hall, is wonderfully understated. He has mannerisms that connect him with the adult Cleg. He plays with little objects, cat's cradles, and has string running across his room like a spider's web, and he picks up bits of smut from the ground and pockets them. He has the same frightened way of mutely staring into space. In retrospect their very eyes seemed the same.

Much credit is due also to another excellent actor, John Neville, as Terrence, the only other inmate of the halfway house that comes into Spider's ken; Miranda Richardson is fine in additional roles. They may seem a bit overdrawn, but then we realize that we are witnessing the hallucinations of an unstable child. All the acting is splendid in this movie.

Cronenberg has created a world in "Spider" that's elaborately decayed and dirty and dripping with moisture. Every object or bare wall is richly patina-ed and ancient, ageless, but the world of the picture is simple and without distractions. Nothing takes your eye off Cleg and his memories or delusions. Cleg moves very deliberately, always hesitating, tentative, withdrawing, withholding. There is no need to overstate horror. It is simply horrible. People will differ on whether this is a great movie. For all its greater integrity and grittiness, it falls prey to the problem of "Beautiful Mind": that we, the sane, cannot know madness, and devices, essentially artificial, must be created to provide us with some substitutes and metaphors for an interior world to which we lack the key. Some of us may feel curiously let down when "Spider" ends without the payoff of a tragedy or a cure. One thinks of T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men": "This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper." But we may find in the days after our viewing that "Spider" has left its stain on our memory.

For those of you reading this prior to seeing the film, I'd simply suggest that such disparate reviews for an accomplished director should be seen as praise. It means that he's taking chances, and risking offending folks. At the very least you could see this film and if offended by it, examine what you found so offensive.

what I consider ***SPOILERS*** follow .....

I think Cronenberg does a fine job working against the Hollywood archetype of such a psychodrama (or even psychosis-o-drama). The unravelling of Spider's story aligns us with him. Having a Cuckoo's Nest caretaker/warden at the very onset sets the wheels in motion.

The Hollywood diagnosis would be that the parents are to blame for the child's detachment or mental disease. Cronenberg plays with perception (both Spider's and thus the audience's). This will bother some, an untrustworthy narrator always does.

Where that perception hits its breaking point will range from viewer to viewer, but gradually we realize that Spider has spun much of what we have seen out of thin air. He begins to have trouble fitting all of the puzzle pieces in place, and thus betrays himself.

In reflecting back now, there does seem to be a very solid Freudian view to much of the action, but during my watching of the film, it never felt so heavy-handed to me.

Perhaps it was the use of Spider's fly-on-the-wall presence that beguiled me. Certainly *outstanding* acting by all involved, Miranda Richardson above the rest. Lots of little details, the sockery (tucking odd bits into their pants...sexual??), the line about the four shirts for a lesser man, Spider's crazy cribbing, the fractured glass window web, the monolithic gasworks like an alien overlord...all of these little details make for a compelling, albeit dark, vision.

That being said, I thought the original buzz on this film was that it was far too harrowing for most folks. I don't think that is the case...there's very little overt violence. However, one slaying that does apparently take place could be controversial. It was for me. In listening to the Cronenberg voice-over during that scene I think he underestimates the amount of senseless violence that many members of his audience have seen. It is not until the next "family" meal that I fully comprehended the violent severing from reality. A well-placed blow.

We do get plenty of sex and confusion, but then again sex is confusion! I've not seen "The Bad Seed" but that may be in the same vein as this film, where we realize ultimately that the child himself really is the source of "horror" here, as opposed to a monstrous mother or father or Mrs. Bates etc...

Cronenberg likes to blur boundaries between internal and external "realities" and decidedly untidy ones at that. This may not insert a VHS in your gut, but it did a nice job of adding some cobwebs to my mind.

7/10