Movie Reviews

What a weird little movie this is.

David Cronenberg's Spider starts off with Dennis 'Spider' Cleg (a great role by Ralph Fiennes) moving into something of a "halfway house" for the mentally ill in London. It's clear that Cleg has some serious issues bouncing around inside his head, though we never hear him speak more than five or six intelligable lines throughout the entire film (he's usually just mumbling softly to himself). Cleg's problems are instead communicated through hallucinations that quite literally play out onscreen, and sometimes appear to get mixed in with 'real life'. We observe that Cleg's problems began when he was a young child, and we watch a series of flashback-type hallucinations in which the young Cleg comes to believe that his father murdered his mother in order to be with a trashy woman he met at a bar. Most of the film explores these flashbacks as Cleg (and the audience) tries to determine what actually happened when Cleg was a child.

There's no doubt that this is an "artsy" film... the plot itself is fairly straight-forward, but there are a number of unusual, strange scenes that exist to convey cryptic metaphors and such. That's certainly not a bad thing, though, as some of those kinds of scenes are very interesting. Cronenberg also manages to create an effectively unsettling atmosphere throughout Spider that further asks the audience to question what is or is not real.

This is the kind of "artsy" film that one tends to think about a lot after seeing it. The only problem is that I think the "thinking about it" is probably more interesting than the "watching it," and I probably won't jump at the chance to see it again.