Spider Information

Spider is a 2002 Canadian/British psychological thriller film produced and directed by David Cronenberg and based on the novel of the same name by Patrick McGrath, who also wrote the screenplay.

The film premiered at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and enjoyed some media buzz; however, it was released in only a few theaters at the year's end by distributor Sony Pictures Classics. Nonetheless, the film enjoyed much acclaim by critics and especially by Cronenberg enthusiasts. The film garnered a Best Director award at the Canadian Genie Awards. The stars of the film, Ralph Fiennes and particularly Miranda Richardson, received several awards for their work in the film.

Plot

Spider is the story of Dennis Cleg, a man who is given a room in a halfway house catering to mentally disturbed persons. Cleg has just been released from a mental institution and in his new abode starts piecing together or recreating in his memory an apparently fateful childhood event. He roams the nearby derelict urban area and the local canal and starts to relive or visualize a period of his childhood in 1950s London with his mother and his father. A shift takes place in the child's psyche when he witnesses his mother groping with his father in the garden and, subsequently, when he sees his mother in a silky night gown she wore for his father. The son, as a grown man seems to recreate in his memory the build up to his father's murder of his mother with the passive support of a prostitute he is involved with, who then moves into the house and is presented as his mother. The young son then kills the mistress by gassing her in the kitchen. After that memory he attempts late one night to kill the landlady whom he sees alternatively as the mistress and his mother, but backs away after she says, "What have you done Mr. Cleg?" He is taken back to the asylum.

Cast

• Ralph Fiennes as Dennis "Spider" Cleg
  • Bradley Hall as young Spider
• Miranda Richardson as Yvonne / Mrs. Cleg
• Gabriel Byrne as Bill Cleg
• John Neville as Terrence
• Lynn Redgrave as Mrs. Wilkinson

Production

During a Q&A session at the Kodak Lecture Series in May 2005, Cronenberg revealed that neither he, nor Fiennes, nor Richardson, nor the producers received any sort of salary during the shooting of the film. All chose to waive their salaries, so the money could be used to bankroll the under-funded production.

Reception

Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 85% based on reviews from 126 critics. On Metacritic, the film had an average score of 83 out of 100, based on 35 reviews.

It was mentioned in the 2002 Sight & Sound Poll by Amy Taubin, who ranked it at 10th.