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.
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.