Spider

A young woman agrees to model for a painter as the Virgin Mary. Under the man’s influence the desires she has kept down come to the surface, and she begins to have delusions and nightmares involving spiders and other distorted images. Vasili Mass deliberately lays religious imagery over sexual imagery, and the narration never clarifies the line between what is real and what is hallucinated. It is the director’s only feature, and over the years it has gathered a small but devoted audience. In the record the title is given in Lithuanian as Žirginėlis, although the film is Latvian and its original title is Zirneklis; the language field says Latvian, so the title and the language do not agree with each other. The film runs ninety-eight minutes and dates from 1992.