Simplified art film will effectively corner you in the space of a tortured soul.
You’d think that with a title like ‘Spider’ our enfant-terrible would be back to his old tricks of disturbing alien-like creations and humans in various states of decay. Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg brings us some more of the specialty: horror, however, it comes in the form of the shockingly deep, psychological scars in the miserable life of one Dennis Cleg (Ralph Fiennes-Red Dragon). With a Freudian-themed exploration of the institutionalized mind, Fiennes covers the full range of schizophrenic gesticulation with illegible slurred gibberish, hieroglyphic notebook writings and his elaborate web-décor, but he subtly creates a sense of internal trauma and distorted psychosis far from the caricatured sickos in most Hollywood crap. Cronenberg narrates a story from a spilt perspective, where we get character back-story through a montage of flashback scenes where we see the protagonist revisit his own defenseless little self and the marking events of his childhood and actors Gabriel Byrne (Miller’s Crossing) and Miranda Richardson (Sleepy Hollow) give us enough reason to make us want to take a step to the concession stand especially with Richardson’s chilling triple portrayal. The thematic element of the charcoal-grey colored settings of London’s slums plunges the viewer into the darkness found in the sub-text and while we witness the character add strings to his shady, empty room in a halfway house and an ‘un’-tanglement process unravels the dark secrets of Spider and a whole other dimension to his character develops.
Even though the film contains a mile away predictable ending, it doesn’t lessen Cronenberg’s overall craft-a technically simplified oeuvre that nourishes our senses is the moody score of Howard Shore juxtaposed to a visually sound, and expertly paced film, which, despite a lack of thrills this has all the elements to keep us gripped by the sheer obscurity of it. This is a Cronenberg-lite type of film, and personally the identical twins of one Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers sticks out as my favorite nightmare of his, but Fiennes dark portrayal is worth the price of admission alone.
