ONE OF DAVID CRONENBERG’S MOST PERFECTLY REALISED FILMS SINCE DEAD RINGERS, SPIDER IS ANOTHER TALE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL BREAKDOWN, THIS TIME BASED ON A PATRICK McGRATH NOVEL.
Spider (Ralph Fiennes) is a shuffling, mumbling man who has just been released from a mental hospital into a halfway house in the grim London suburb where he grew up. Elements of his past and present intermingle as he investigates the pivotal event of his childhood: the murder of his saintly mother by his father, who then replaces her in the household with a prostitute he met down the pub. In the character of Spider, Cronenberg recognised a figure found in so many of his films: the outsider artist whose obsessions threaten to destroy him. Cronenberg calls Spider an ‘existential figure who could have been in the works of Beckett, Kafka or Dostoevsky.’ And it’s no accident that Fiennes even looks a little like Beckett.