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Spider
Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Gabriel Byrne, Miranda Richardson, Bradley Hall
Running Time: 1:40
Country: Canada/UK
Year: 2002
Web: Official Site
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After a long internment in a psychiatric hospital, Mr. Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) is sent to a reintegration home, located in his childhood neighborhood. Imperceptibly, he relives the drama that ruined his existence. His father (Gabriel Byrne) assassinated his mother (Miranda Richardson) and replaced her with a vile and vulgar prostitute with whom he was in love. But is all this reality? Wouldn't have this man—nicknamed Spider by his mother—rather have taken refuge in madness in order to withdraw himself from a much more scary truth?
David Cronenberg's film was much awaited in Cannes. The director already made a scandal with Crash in 1996. The echoes that preceded this new work were more than favorable. Spider is a film controlled from beginning to end, lit remarkably, all in interior shots… but disappointing! Indeed, the entire plot rests on the final twist on which this strange film closes.
Cronenberg forsakes his organic universes for very cerebral fiction. The film is an incursion into the sick brain of a man who is broken apart, a theme that should not leave David Lynch indifferent, as the American director is quite familiar with this type of narration. But Cronenberg precisely suffers from this comparison. He indeed uses coarse processes, far too explanatory, such as the presence in each shot of the principal character, sharing space with his double as a child. Spider mutely witnesses the repetition of the drama that he lived. The fiction resembles the puzzle that he tries to compose and the webs that he weaves using threads. The film consists of disentangling this dense network of lines and unraveling the complex tangle of the hero's phantasmagoria. However, the viewer doesn't have the pleasure to lose himself in these narrative meanders, which is a shortcoming. As in Existenz, the end of the film rests on the swing from one reality to another, an effect that's too easy.
Spider thus suffers from a lack of opacity and exploration of these shadow zones that previously made the mystery and the singularity of Cronenberg's cinema. What remains is Ralph Fiennes' feverish, inhabited and very interior performance, but that is a bit too excessive at times. This character assimilates into the spider whose nickname he carries. Spider is an inhabitant of the shadows, weaving the web of his own perdition.
Sandrine Marques
 A History of Violence
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Spider review
