Movie Review - Spider

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2002 – Spoiler alerts I finally found a David Cronenberg movie I dislike. Spider is surprisingly tedious. The opening scene has the central character, Spider, take ten minutes to shuffle from the train to the dingy run down guest house he has moved to following his release from a psychiatric institution. Ralph Fiennes (Voldermort) is very good as the intensely introspective, intense and deeply disturbed Spider, though other residents in the house seem to be very contrived, using strange speeches about scorpions and Africa just to say look we have issues too, but the focus is then entirely on Spider. He is soon losing himself on trips of remembrance to his troubled childhood, which he observes like a ghost from A Christmas Carol, invisible, but able to see the tragedy of his own past unfold. As a child, in the same East End Of London canal side slum district as the hostel he is living in as an adult, he sees his brutal drunken father (Gabriel Byrne) seemingly abandon his (Spider’s) mother (Miranda Richardson) for a prostitute, and the boy is convinced that his father has murdered the mother to set up the new relationship, except it is the boy himself who we find out has committed the murder, in psychotically confusing the mother and the prostitute figure. Now released, he becomes embittered towards the landlady of his hostel (who is also played by Miranda Richardson) and gets dangerously close to murdering her before being escorted back to the mental institution again. Cronenberg uses his standard what is real and what is fantasy / delusion / surreal to depict a simple and simplistic madness means murder message that just seems hollow in a movie that goes on way too long even at just over an hour and a half. Arthur Chappell