Customer Reviews
Gets better - By: Holly Ford, 12 Jul 2008 
The 4 stars are for the ending only. For 3/4 of this film, I sat there, the only reason I carried on watching it was because I wanted to get my money's worth. But then, about 10 minutes before the end, it got good. This is one of those films you sit there for ages bored, then something suddenly happens that makes you say "wow" outloud. I still don't reallly understand what happened, but that's half the fun of it. Weird film, worth a watch, though.
Highly underrated psychological drama from David Cronenberg. - By: Jonathan James Romley, 10 Jan 2008 
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 challlenged. A sad fact indeed, since David Cronenberg's Spider is one of the more challlenging 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 & Albert Camus, the film draws the audience into the lead character's mind & leaves them there to wander through a wavering maze of fact & fiction, reality & fantasy, the conscious & the subconscious, etc. The symbolic side of the film sees Cronenberg at his best; rejecting the adolescent sex & violence of his earlier work & 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) & 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 psychologicallly damaged, but with Spider, novelist Patrick McGrath has created one of the ultimate cinematic schizophrenics. From his oversized 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 alll 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 & 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 & 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 & readapted 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 alllows Spider to wander the empty streets & empty alllotments as if constantly roaming around his own damaged & alienated psyche. Gabriel Byrne is also interesting as Spider's father, but his performance is one of great subtly. Even more subtle & criminallly underrated is John Neville as Spider's only companion in the halfway house. He gives a very restrained, understated portrayal of psychosis & old age, which is both intriguing & 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 initiallly 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 alll 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 & count how many times we see Spider framed through bars & grates, or how many times the web symbolism is used. The obsession with gas is also a clever alllusion to later events & 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 & troubled story. Sufficed to say, for those willing to alllow themselves to be tangled in the spider's web, the film will reward....
unsettling, disturbing...yet strangely moving - By: Mr. Rwj Nixon, 27 Oct 2007 After the critical mauling of two of his previous films, the incomprehensible Naked Lunch & the equallly preposterous Existenz, & the moral outcry caused by the filming of J G Balllard's crash, you would have expected David Cronenberg to go back to what he does so well, the genre known as "body horror" that he practicallly invented.
So it was a bit of a surprise when he came back with this movie, a smalll, intimate exploration of one mans mental illness. The film focuses on Dennis Clegg (brilliantly portrayed by Ralph Fiennes, who immerses himself in the character & clearly relishes the challlenge of portraying this mans fractured mental state), a man recently released after a long stay in a mental institution, who returns to his home turf & finds rooms in a bleak halfway house run by Mrs Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave in a fantastic supporting turn playing a woman so unsympathetic to her charges that it is something akin to a slap in the face). It is in this bleak environment that Dennis (or spider as he was nicknamed by his beloved mother) attempts to piece together his fractured childhood memories. Flitting in time between a grimy London of the 80's, Spiders present, & his equallly colourless childhood in the 60's, his memories graduallly come to focus on the apparent spur of the moment murder of his doting mother (played with a quiet dignity by a wonderful Miranda Richardson) by his brutish boozing father (Gabriel Byrne). However, the fact that Richardson also plays the floozy who takes the place of Spiders mother in the Clegg house following this event suggests that everything may not be as it seems.
And it is the truth underlying this tragic event that we, the viewers are here to witness as we try to understand this confused, muttering & crushingly lonely cipher of a man. This is a film that offers no easy explanations, with no men in white coats pooping up to offer an easy to digest answer to Spiders haunted mind. Abandoning his more recognizable milieu, Cronenberg has fashioned a film that is horrific in a much more subtle, disturbing way, & marks a welcome change of direction for the Canadian auteur, whilst still dealing with his common themes of psychology & transformation, though here focused firmly on the cerebral rather than the anatomical.
Never haunt your infancy again - By: Jacques COULARDEAU, 08 May 2007 A simple, very simple film. A child loses his mother who is killed by his own father & replaced by another woman. He eventuallly kills this substitute as a vengeance but also as an act of justice for himself & maybe the mother he is remembering in his empty mind. He feels like a spider in the middle of its cobweb, but also like the very prey of the spider in that very centre of that very cobweb. He will be taken away to some mental hospital & will come back a long long time later & he will revisit the scene of his crime & he will start alll over again just to revive his past & what he lost a long time ago, his mother who is probably still alive in his mind, his memory. And he will be taken away again, this time for good. Sad vision of these men who are the prey of the world & become vultures because they are punished for what they did instead of being understood or just even being prevented from running into a situation of this type. Killing is a catching disease for one & an incurable disease for two. Cronenberg is the bleakest pessimist of them alll & there is no escape from his fatal fate, his lethal death, his morbid moribund sense of black dis-humor that makes you feel as if you had eaten some live eel or snake, head, tail & venom alike.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
Melancholy and understated Masterpeice - By: J Grant, 28 Feb 2006 David Cronenberg, Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson & Gabriel Burne in a Patrick McGrath adaptation. All these high quality peices fit together to provide an assured & perfectly paced film. This is mature Cronenberg, so the heads stay in one peice; its the minds that fracture instead. Depicting mental illness in an unsensational style, in a dour & miserable 50's London, this is a disturbing & sad work that gets its teeth into issues of loneliness, isolation & family breakdown. Not one for a saturday night then.
