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May 11 2003
By Tom Ryan

Ralph Fiennes in the title role of David Cronenberg's Spider.

MA, 99 minutes
At the Nova, George and Europa cinemas

There are no creepy crawlies or eight-legged freaks on the loose in Spider. Despite the title, it doesn't mark a return to the horror genre for David Cronenberg, whose earlier credits include Shivers (1975), The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981) and The Fly (1986). His films have always had an unsettling edge, but the 60-year-old Toronto-born director has never been especially interested in this kind of horror anyway.

His work has always been more concerned with the monsters lurking inside his troubled protagonists than the ones attacking them from without. The alternative title for Shivers was, in fact, They Came From Within, and psychological disturbances are to the fore in most of what he's done, from the aforementioned horror films through The Dead Zone (1983) and Dead Ringers (1988) to The Naked Lunch (1991), Crash (1996) and, now, Spider.

Written by Patrick McGrath, adapting his own novel, and immaculately shot by Peter Suschitzky, Cronenberg's 16th feature begins with a shot of a train pulling into a station. The camera looks along the platform as commuters begin to embark, carrying their briefcases, bustling about their business. As it moves steadily forward against their flow, they rush past on their way to the exit. It's the last untrammelled view we're to be allowed of the everyday world (although it takes some time for this to become evident).

The camera comes to a halt only as Spider (Ralph Fiennes), whose real name is Dennis Cleg, slowly emerges from his compartment. Dressed like a tramp, carrying a tattered case and muttering inaudibly to himself, he's just as preoccupied as those who've preceded him, but is in sharp contrast with them. They know exactly where they're going; he seems lost in some private reverie. They're in a hurry; he appears to have all the time in the world.

Spider's pace dictates that of the film. The camera patiently watches in wide shot as he walks along a curiously deserted street in London's East End before knocking on the door of the halfway house that is his destination. Cronenberg makes only sparse use of point-of-view shots: the first is of the address written on a piece of paper; the second is in response to his look of terror at the gas fireplace in his room (a reaction whose significance is not to become clear until much later). But, despite the generally detached viewpoint of the camera, Spider locks us inside its protagonist's experiences.

Recently released from a psychiatric hospital, he's clearly still suffering from a severe mental disturbance. He walks furtively, his eyes darting around, ever wary, fearful he is being pursued, trusting of no one. When Mrs Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave), the no-nonsense proprietor of the halfway house, reaches for his case to help him to his room, he refuses to allow her to touch it. But when he unpacks it soon afterwards, his protectiveness seems inexplicable. There seems to be nothing of importance inside: a pair of ragged pyjamas, an old clock, a notebook, some pieces of string. Like his life, its contents have order and meaning only for him.

His most treasured possession is the notebook, which he removes from his case and hides under the carpet. Periodically he retrieves it in order to add to its collection of tightly written but totally indecipherable scribbles, his version of a diary. Like everything else about this troubled man, what he writes makes sense only to him.

His arrival at the start is also a coming home, for this is the area where he grew up. His daily wanderings find him not only remembering those formative years but also literally stepping into his past, sharing the image with himself as a child (Bradley Hall). Like a ghost, he watches as the relationship between his parents (Miranda Richardson and Gabriel Byrne) disintegrates, often mouthing their words just before or just after they're spoken, as if going over them in his mind. He also witnesses his father's destructive affair with a prostitute encountered in the local pub (also played, in an astonishing double act, by Richardson).

It's revealed during one of his visits to the past that he acquired the nickname of Spider from his mother, who used to captivate him with her stories of the webs she would come across in the countryside during her Essex childhood. And as an adult he remains obsessed by this, carefully creating his own versions of them with string in his room. At the same time, the various places he passes through — the halfway house, his childhood home, the local pub, the nearby allotment — become like juncture points in the web spun by his own life.

As religiously as Spider pursues his private routines, Cronenberg creates a self-contained world, revising the working-class milieu of British realism (traceable through the "kitchen-sink" melodramas of the 1960s to the more recent work of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh) and transforming it into a rundown city of the mind.

Here psychological circumstances matter more than social ones and the issue of how things fit together is central. The film's entire narrative is organised around Spider's attempt to solve the mystery that is his past, and it's pervaded by images of other things being destroyed and rebuilt, such as a jigsaw and a broken window.

Fiennes, who says he used Samuel Beckett as a key to his performance, has always brought a nervy edge to his roles, from the Nazi officer he plays in Schindler's List to his Prince Charming in Maid in Manhattan. And it's the same here, as he creates a character as distinctive and unsettling in his way as Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates was in Hitchcock's Psycho: another sad, mother-obsessed creature who's lived apart for too long.

Spider makes A Beautiful Mind look like a Disney fairytale and it isn't easy going. The pace is carefully measured, the depiction of mental illness from the inside is terrifying, and the tone is oppressively bleak. But Cronenberg's film is also meticulously made and extraordinarily uncompromising, the work of an artist for whom the integrity of the material matters much more than the queue at the box office.



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