Spider

Spider (2002) is about a man moving into a halfway house in London. Dennis Cleg has just come out of a psychiatric hospital; he mutters to himself, writes notes in a hand nobody can read, and barely speaks. He returns to the neighbourhood where he grew up and reconstructs his mother's death there. The formal idea is showing memory. The adult Dennis stands inside scenes from his own past, watching, and nobody sees him. How much of what is shown is true is never stated. David Cronenberg directed. The source is Patrick McGrath's novel and McGrath wrote the screenplay. It is one of the films in which Cronenberg leaves body horror entirely: no effects, no blood, nothing but a man's mind. Ralph Fiennes plays Dennis and does not produce a single intelligible sentence across the film. Miranda Richardson plays three separate roles, and that choice is the key to everything: Dennis's inability to tell women apart is written directly into the image. It was made cheaply and took almost nothing at the box office, among the least seen of Cronenberg's films. It runs 98 minutes. Good for: psychological structure, Ralph Fiennes, and the quiet side of Cronenberg. Less good for: it is extremely slow with almost no dialogue. The palette is deliberately drained and grey. The narrative does not resolve and the viewer is given nothing to hold, on purpose.