Spider (2002)

To me, this movie is perfection.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

I am a fan of David Cronenberg's work but I disagree with some other reviewers that write Spider is his best movie. Don't get me wrong, it isn't bad at all but it was just a bit slow and sometimes too confusing to me. If there was one thing that was really good in Spider then it was the performance of Ralph Fiennes. He plays his role as the mentally disturbed Spider very well. The rest of the cast did a good job as well. Nothing bad to say about any of the actors. Even though the story is sometimes confusing at the end you get most of the answers. Some that you did see coming by the way. All in all it was a good movie to watch once but saying it's David Cronenberg's best is a bit exaggerated.

An absolutely crushing bore, I held on to the bitter end, waiting and hoping for a twist or a revelation and was soundly disappointed. A film about a man newly arrived at a half-way house after being released from the asylum, Spider is a dreary portrait of a schizophrenic who mumbles, broods, smokes heavily and scribbles gibberish into a notebook, all the while going over tragic memories from his childhood-- including the murder of his beloved mother by his boozy, loutish father, and his own murder of his father's new wife by gas poisoning, while she lay passed out in a chair.All in all, Ralph Fiennes decent portrayal of a troubled mind was not near enough to keep this story afloat. Feeling very unlike the Cronenburg pictures I know and respect, Spider could have been a truly depressing film. Instead we are treated to a long, boring movie with a non-ending, and absolutely nothing positive to be gleaned from it's content.

In Spider, Cronenberg seems to have been trying to move into a new style, more visually subtle and without the reliance on special effects. Unfortunately, he has also started to toe the line politically and psychologically, losing the radical edge of some earlier films.The central performance by Fiennes as Clegg is technically interesting and appears at first to be a well researched and sympathetic approach to mental illness. His script (if you can call it a script) consists mostly of mumbling his own internal dialogue. His desperate attempt to make sense of his life by writing down childhood memories in his own invented language is quite moving. The character rings true to this extent.Cronenberg's typical multi-layered distortion of reality is present. The adult Clegg is shown as an observer at various key events in his childhood, telling us that we are seeing these events as memories in the present. Thanks. However, we never really know which are real and which are imagined. Did the blonde slapper in the pub exist at all? Did Clegg actually kill his mother or is this just another symbolic building block in his psychosis? His father's reaction to her death in the house seems unnaturally muted, which suggests this may be another figment - or is it just poor acting? The present-time action of the film takes place over just two or three days while he is living in a halfway house after release from a secure mental institution.This is a theoretically ambitious film, so I feel justified in judging it on theoretical grounds. It is strongly Freudian in its psychological theory. One of the first disturbances to Clegg's psyche comes when he finds his mother trying on a night-dress. He runs away when she says she's trying to make herself attractive for his father. This is obviously supposed to show the formation of the Oedipus complex which dominates the film's psychology. The Madonna-whore imagery of the blonde- and dark-haired mothers is also a rather heavy-handed effort at psychological or even esoteric depth.More disappointing is that there is no convincing explanation for Clegg's psychosis apart from Freudian dogma. It just happens, and isn't it a shame. The shame is that Cronenberg has backed away from the radically critical position of films like Videodrome to this completely orthodox embodiment of Freudian psychology and the organic disease model of mental illness.Spider takes itself very seriously, without having much to say. If it had been able to show some kind of inner aetiology from a contingent and biographical rather than a purely theoretical point of view, it could have been a decent drama.

The titular Spider is Ralph Fiennes who has just been discharged from the mental institute. He takes residence in a home which houses other people from the hospital who have been let out. While he is there, he recreates his childhood and observes how his father behaved with his mom. This must have been a very difficult movie to make. The lead actor practically does not speak for any substantial length and has few dialogues. Hence it would have been a very tough challenge for the director to keep the viewers interested. I am very glad that the David Cronenberg bested the challenge and made this into a very gripping piece of cinema. Fiennes is off the charts brilliant. His brooding intensity and the way he mumbles really has to be seen to be believed. This is his best performance after Schindler's List in my opinion and my respect for him as an actor has increased tremendously. The direction is superb. The way the past and the present blend together gives new meaning to the word smooth. Loved it totally. 3.5 out of 5. Must watch for fans of gripping drama and great acting