However, the halfway home also happens to be in the same East London neighbourhood that Spider grew up in during the 1950s, across from a huge gasworks factory and along the grimy banks of the Thames. Here, Spider attempts to reintegrate into society and develop the skills he needs to cope with his challenges. Wilkinson, a stern but motherly figure played by Lynn Redgrave. In Spider, the titular character is a man who has been released from a psychiatric facility and finds lodging in a halfway home for the mentally ill. ![]() While Cronenberg is often remembered for the visceral and philosophical aspects of his films, Spider is an example of how good Cronenberg is with actors, and how he brings out the best in his performers, even actors like Jeremy Irons, and here, Fiennes, who have a substantial body of work to their name. He disappears into the role, not with makeup and grand costumes, but through the painful memories he reveals through his movements. While Fiennes is reliably good across genres, including in comedic roles in films like The Grand Budapest Hotel and Hail Caesar!, in Spider he creates one of his greatest dramatic performances. Instead, it draws us into the narrow, tragic world of Spider by utilizing a performance by one of the world’s finest actors.įiennes is rightly considered a great actor, best known for his work in Oscar-winning films like Schindler’s List and The English Patient and as Voldemort in the Harry Potter series and. It does this without fancy camera tricks or shocking twists. What makes Spider a particularly Cronenbergesque film is the way that it explores issues of sexuality, the notion of what constitutes mental health, and the way that our biological interface with the world can ultimately betray us. But Spider is more of an exploration of the ways that a severe mental illness like schizophrenia becomes an entire world for the person afflicted. Many films covering similar territory would fall under the umbrella of the “puzzle film ” they would be about finding out the truth of the plot. What is perhaps most impressive about this film with a number of praiseworthy aspects is how successful it is in bringing the subjectivity of a schizophrenic to the screen. Based on the novel by Patrick McGrath, who also provided the screenplay, Spider is an attempt to bring a fairly literary conceit, the unreliable narrator, to the screen. ![]() It’s fairly concise in the scope of its plot as well. It’s focused on a handful of characters and relies strongly on the performances of its lead actors, notably Ralph Fiennes in the title role of Dennis “Spider” Cleg, a mentally ill man whose nickname points to his cloistered and webbed mind, and Miranda Richardson in a key dual supporting role. Spider is more intimate than the films that preceded and followed it. ![]() But before that phase of his career, he made Spider, a film that doesn’t easily fit with what came before or after. One can also see it as a kind of caesura-which means a pause between movements-before his subsequent film, A History of Violence, which would become his biggest box office hit since The Fly and kick off a number of collaborations with Viggo Mortensen. In my review of eXistenZ, I suggested that that film marked the end of a particular phase of Cronenberg’s career and that Spider, his 2002 follow up, marked a turn of sorts in his career.
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