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182 comments in total

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95 out of 107 people found the following comment useful :-
A much misunderstood film, 18 May 2005

Author: Craig Estrella (Surecure) from Toronto, Canada

There are always films that people will either see what the director was going for, or simply won't connect with the film. David Cronenberg's Spider is one of those films.

Many comparisons can be made between this film and the Ron Howard film A Beautiful Mind in that they both examine the complexities of mental illness. Whereas Howard took the glamorous Hollywood style approach -- complete with government agents and associated adventures -- Cronenberg continues to prove that less is more when it comes to film. Spider is significantly more effective in that it does not candy coat its subject, rather approaching the scenario with brute realism.

Cronenberg is certainly one of the most under-appreciated and misunderstood directors of our age in terms of popular appeal. His films are not for mass marketing and popcorn sales, but rather are psychologically and sociologically challenging to the viewer. Cronenberg films generally demand a surrender from the audience to an unsettling reality, and Spider is no different. The fractured perception offered by the protagonist as displayed through Cronenberg's eye is truly unique and refreshing.

If you are the type of person who is up for quick, easy entertainment, Spider is not your film. But, if you want to explore a brilliantly crafted submergence into the strange reality of a mentally ill person, Spider will leave you wanting more. Cronenberg has once again proved that there are few directors of his talent and skill. His ability to create a wholly original feel in film incomparable to any of his contemporaries is always welcomed by this viewer.

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81 out of 95 people found the following comment useful :-
My failed, boring and patronising attempt to help reveal the cinematic brilliance in this film, 15 December 2004
Author: PsychicDante

I've read a few of the other user comments about this film and often words and phrases like pretentious, dull, boring, lacking in entertainment are used. All fair comments, it is definitely not a film for a fantastical exciting escapist experience - however, I would suggest that a little effort on the part of the viewer will pay big dividends.

The first thing to say is that the actual plot of the film is not the main focus of the film. This is all about the madness, and subtle questions that are raised and need to be held in your mind throughout.

Every scene provides vital information, but do not forget we are seeing inside the 30 or 40 year old memories of a man who has spent most of his life in a mental asylum. I would not advise taking any scene at face value, particularly the flashbacks.

It is a challenging film and may at first seem to lack coherence, or be artsy for the sake of it. However, like the jigsaws that appear in the film in various forms it is the final pieces that are the hardest to deal with and potentially the most dangerous.

And at the end we are left with a question - is Spider's trauma the cause of his insanity, or is his insanity the cause of the trauma.

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50 out of 58 people found the following comment useful :-
This film is nothing short of a Masterpiece, 17 April 2003

Author: John Broadway from Athens,Greece

This film kept me totally engaged during every single second. The acting was no less than you would expect from such a talented cast - brilliant performances from all. Ralph Fiennes is just superb. Gabriel Byrne in probably the most difficult role of his career to date keeps the `secret' to the end. John Neville and Lynn Redgrave, provide the supporting roles with a flare that never upstages the lead actors. Bradley Hall as the Boy Spider gave a fine performance as only child actors can. But it was the Chalk and Cheese characters play by Miranda Richardson that for me stole the show and clearly shows how deep her talents run.

The script, adapted by the author of the book, was powerful without going over the top and was very authentic. Even throwaway lines by supporting actors had meaning and helped convey the power and momentum of this masterpiece `.. seven packets of Crisps and a packet of Embassy.' Many times have I uttered similar words in a London Pub.

The locations were so real, you could smell and tasted them - I grew up in such a places and in the same period as the Boy Spider - every single and highly accurate detail brought my childhood memories rushing back.

The story is real - events like the critical event in this film really did happen and still do.

For international readers, England from the late 70's onwards adopted a 'Care in the Community' programme and every city and major town has halfway houses, like the one portrayed in this film, where newly released inmates of mental institutions are ordinarily just dumped to fend for themselves.

This film is nothing short of a Masterpiece - the real pity is that it won't appeal to a wider international audience.

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48 out of 59 people found the following comment useful :-
May be Cronenberg's best, 11 February 2003

Author: Bri-10 from New York

I was lucky enough to see a screening of this in Queens, where David Cronenberg spoke about the film afterwards. He may be the most intelligent filmmaker working today. This is such an incredibly complex film, with so many levels of interpretations and ambiguity, which most great films offer an audience. The acting is first-rate and Oscar-worthy in a literal sense, not a bulls*** Hollywood sense; the composition of the shots is beautiful; the story is flawless and engaging; the production design is perfect - I could go on, but you get the picture. What's unfortunate is so many critics are discussing this film as one about schizophrenia, which it really isn't, nor was it meant to be. As it turns out, it is an excellent representation of the schizophrenic experience. But Cronenberg intended it to be representational of the human condition, with all its mysteries, uncertainties and existential anxieties. What was never an uncertainty, however, is Cronenberg's skillful mastery of delivering genius.

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27 out of 34 people found the following comment useful :-
A Wandering Mind, 21 April 2005

Author: Ling Xiaoyu from Finland

This film is one of the most under-rated, I have to say. I know it takes awhile to get into and you have to use your mind while you watch it but it's not THAT complicated, is it? Especially if you watch this film more than once you really become to understand what it is it with Spider. I don't want to give away the plot, because you really have to see it for yourself. It's surprising and pleasantly different.

I have to highlight the acting in the film, it's that superb. All the actors are just simply amazing, taking the acting to a completely new level. So, if you want to try something that's not so mainstream film-making, watch Spider. I dare you.

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28 out of 40 people found the following comment useful :-
One of the best films ever made, 24 April 2004

Author: lordedmund from United Kingdom

In David Cronenberg's brilliant psychological thriller, the excellent Ralph Fiennes gives a standout performance as Spider Cleg, a man who is released from a mental institution, and is forced to relive the horrors of his childhood, prowling the East End. Fiennes is superb in the lead role, and Miranda Richardson is magnificent in her three roles. Gabriel Byrne, Lynn Redgrave and John Neville all help carry the film along, which at times, can be a little slow. I liked this film, because it was similar to A Beautiful Mind, which also focused on mental illness. This is one of my all time great films, and I think the performances from the cast are faultless.

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21 out of 27 people found the following comment useful :-
Arachnophobic, 5 March 2003
Author: george.schmidt (george.schmidt@hbo.com) from fairview, nj

SPIDER (2003) *** Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, Bradley Hall, Lynn Redgrave, John Neville. Filmmaker David Cronenberg does it again : mixing psychological drama with Gothic mystery with the cloak of violence in the air with Fiennes (in a brilliantly mannered near mute turn) as the titular character, a schizophrenic recently released to a halfway house, nicknamed in his youth by his mother (Richardson who gives an excellent turn to the third power; she inhibits three interlaced roles that act as the story's linchpin) for his cat's cradle yarn confections which sends his scattershot memories into overdrive as he attempts to connect the missing pieces of his life. Told in intersperses of flashback Cronenberg expertly uses his persuasive powers of dread eke out the thin plottings of Patrick McGrath's novel – who adapted the screenplay too – that can tax on the nerves in long, baroque stretches of near silence. Dank, rotting production design by Andrew Sanders, excellently lensed by Peter Suschitzky and the chamber music-like score by Howard Shore makes the most of its broken-minded protagonist's living nightmare.

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12 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
Spider creeps into your brain, 11 March 2003
Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

David Cronenberg's "Spider" is a kind of antidote to the upbeat depiction of madness found in last year's "Beautiful Mind." The latter ends with the crazy man turned into nothing more than a slightly befuddled genius, receiving an honorary delayed Premio Nobel with his loyal wife beside him. Spider ends with the isolated, pathetic Dennis Cleg ("Spider," Ralph Fiennes) being taken from a grim halfway house back to the asylum from which he came. He has not worked out, to put it very mildly.

The "Beautiful Mind" character, John Nash, achieves a semblance of normality. Insanity is something he pops in and out of, like a computer game, and resolves to turn away from by sheer force of will, no thanks to Ed Harris but very much with the help of a good wife (Jennifer Connelly). Dennis Cleg is utterly deranged. Any sort of wife and any sort of life are out of the question for him and always were as the movie gradually explains to us.

"Spider" is more interior. It makes us focus on Cleg and enter his world by following him off a train to the address he's been sent to stay at. He gets there by a slow stumbling shuffle, muttering to himself, stooping over to pick up tiny objects beside puddles in the dingy gritty London streets of Cronenberg's film. "Spider" is a very creepy picture, and Cleg is a very creepy man. "Spider" works almost entirely without special effects and yet like many of Cronenberg's movies it has a hallucinatory, trippy quality from first to last. Nothing could be much trippier than "Naked Lunch" and "eXistenZ" but what makes "Spider" like an eerie dream is the slowness with which it movies. Spider's shuffle compels us to move with him and into his mind.

Cleg is a very, very odd, withdrawn, strange, almost totally uncommunicative creature, living almost certainly more in the past than the present, inhabiting that past doubly--because he cannot get it out of his mind and it also appears now that the halfway house is very near where he lived as a child and he finds his way back to actual sites of the primal scenes that drove him mad (except that clearly he was always mad, or ready to go mad). He inhabits thus in mind and body now in the hallucinatory scenes of the movie this strange childhood, the world of a boy with a mother (Miranda Richardson) and a father (Gabriel Byrne) in a poor working class house in East London. What is going on? We go back again and again to the same scenes: to a pub where tarts smoke and laugh mockingly, where his dad comes in the evening. To the kitchen where he sits with his mum. He is sent back and forth. His father goes with one of the tarts. The boy follows them.

Or does he? Here as in "Beautiful Mind" the protagonist enters the world of his madness before your eyes, but this time we're not fooled for long. Spider scribbles frenzied notes in a hidden journal, trying desperately, it appears, to figure out what his memories mean. The impossibility of his task is shown in the writing, which is gibberish. He lives with a fearful terror, inside multiple shirts, not daring to look anyone in the eye, but he himself is dangerous and doomed.

The boy Cleg is excellent. Not as mannered and creepy as the adult Cleg (a Beckett figure whose performance, excellently done by Fiennes, is mostly dumbshow), he's nonetheless very much like the older Fiennes in the picture, and the young actor, Bradley Hall, is wonderfully understated. He has mannerisms that connect him with the adult Cleg. He plays with little objects, cat's cradles, and has string running across his room like a spider's web, and he picks up bits of smut from the ground and pockets them. He has the same frightened way of mutely staring into space. In retrospect their very eyes seemed the same.

Much credit is due also to another excellent actor, John Neville, as Terrence, the only other inmate of the halfway house that comes into Spider's ken; Miranda Richardson is fine in additional roles. They may seem a bit overdrawn, but then we realize that we are witnessing the hallucinations of an unstable child. All the acting is splendid in this movie.

Cronenberg has created a world in "Spider" that's elaborately decayed and dirty and dripping with moisture. Every object or bare wall is richly patina-ed and ancient, ageless, but the world of the picture is simple and without distractions. Nothing takes your eye off Cleg and his memories or delusions. Cleg moves very deliberately, always hesitating, tentative, withdrawing, withholding. There is no need to overstate horror. It is simply horrible. People will differ on whether this is a great movie. For all its greater integrity and grittiness, it falls prey to the problem of "Beautiful Mind": that we, the sane, cannot know madness, and devices, essentially artificial, must be created to provide us with some substitutes and metaphors for an interior world to which we lack the key. Some of us may feel curiously let down when "Spider" ends without the payoff of a tragedy or a cure. One thinks of T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men": "This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper." But we may find in the days after our viewing that "Spider" has left its stain on our memory.

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15 out of 21 people found the following comment useful :-
A quiet atmospheric character study of a disturbed man watching his childhood play out again before his eyes., 14 July 2004
Author: Ben_Cheshire from Oz

We watch Spider (Ralph Fiennes) at the present time, trying to live at a boarding house which takes pity on people who should legally be in mental institutions, and, in parallel action, watch him reliving his childhood, doomed to stand watching those events play out again and again, an observer as impotent as he felt when they originally happened.

This film is a mystery into the character and history of Ralph Fiennes' character. Its a little film, dealing with the mind of one troubled little man, and a patient film. Its also a very mature film from Cronenberg, where he has done away with the shock tactics of the past, and the results are delightful. But if you don't like patient films (and you might see it as a slow film - don't expect big action, expect to watch a fascinating character - and maybe discover why he's so troubled), watch any of Cronenberg's previous efforts instead.

Its not a very big or important film - not one of the most essential films of 2002, but if you've seen those more important choices, and are looking for something different, Spider may just be an interesting, atmospheric experience for you.

8/10. Maybe I was just in the perfect mood for it, but i loved Spider. I thought it was a beautiful and atmospheric character study. Spider is a real unique character, brought to life vividly by Ralph Fiennes.

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18 out of 28 people found the following comment useful :-
Freud would have loved Spider!!, 10 December 2003

Author: oso_travis from Mexico City

I loved this film! The novel that is based on, must have a lot of Freud psyche theories, because the film just reflects it. And in such a perfect manner. Cronenberg has reached a point where he has got a mature talent.

It is a brilliant exploration of the Unconscious, of The Edipus Complex, and of Guilt. Cronenberg does for The Edipus Complex here, what Lynch did for The Nightmare in "Mullholland Dr." We really get into Gleg "Spider"'s mind. And it's very terrifying and disturbing inside. Not pretty at all.

The cast did an outstanding job. All my praises should go to Fiennes, and especially to Miranda Richardson who plays three different characters with a master talent. She's living prove that there's no justice at the Oscars.

If you study psychiatry or psychology go and see it! It's a must see. If you love cinema, go and see it also. One of the year's best.

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