Spider

Ralph Fiennes plays a grown man haunted by his childhood in David Cronenberg's stylized psychological drama Spider. Upon his release from a mental institution, Spider (Fiennes) takes up residence in a halfway house. Paranoid, quiet, and forever making notes, Spider spends much of the film remembering scenes from his youth, specifically a horrific event from his childhood that occurred after he came to believe that his father (Gabriel Byrne) was having an affair on his mother (Miranda Richardson). The psychological terror builds to a climax that challenges how much the viewer can believe Spider's recollections of the event. Bradley Hall plays Spider as a boy, and Richardson portrays many different women who come into contact with Spider. Spider was screened in competition at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. — Perry Seibert
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David Cronenberg is a filmmaker so full of ideas that he sometimes seems to have trouble coming up with a narrative framework which will support them all; at times Videodrome and eXistenZ seemed to exist more for the sake of their subtexts rather than their principle story lines. But while Spider is one of his most powerful and compelling voyages into the human psyche, it's also a rare example of a film where Cronenberg doesn't seem to have quite enough material to flesh out a full-length feature. Ralph Fiennes gives an riveting performance as the emotionally damaged Spider, but so much time is spent watching Fiennes silently wrestle with the horrible memories in his head that one senses this is a brilliant one-hour film stretched to fit 99 minutes; it's a testament to the strength of Fiennes' work that he's able to make so many scenes in which he's not doing much of anything so absorbing. But the material in Spider that works ranks with the best realized moments in Cronenberg's career: He handles his cast beautifully (Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, and Lynn Redgrave all deliver top-shelf performances), his vision of a gray and crumbling England trapped somewhere in time is superb, and the remarkably detailed flashbacks of Spider's blighted childhood are at once painful and mesmerizing. Spider is a flawed film, but one well worth watching; even its lesser moments are too strong to dismiss, and the highlights are at once horrible, honest, and deeply human.