In the lead up to the 7th Canadian Film Festival in Australia (August 2012), join us as we countdown the Top 100 Canadian Films of the past 30 years. We'll be posting one film a day leading up to Canada Day on July 1st 2012. Do you agree with our team favourites? Let us know your thoughts!
#42 - Spider
He mumbles nonsensical utterances under his breath. He wears four collared shirts at all times. He keeps a notebook full of carefully organised scribbles hidden under the carpet in his room, paranoid that someone will read his gibberish notes.
He is Spider: a man that is clearly not “all there” in the mind, who has moved to a halfway house in a dank, dodgy area of London after being released from a mental institution. Only a few words spoken by Spider are intelligible, and yet the film is cleverly structured to reveal the character’s past - and the source of his neurosis - through flashbacks to his childhood that soon become enmeshed with the present day. He gets his nickname from his proclivity to make webs out of rope with his fingers, and more elaborately across the ceiling in his bedroom, as a distraction from his parents’ troubled marriage.
When he learns that his father murdered his mother in a moment of panic, Spider begins to plot revenge against his father and his father’s mistress. As the film progresses, however, Spider begins to see both his mother and the mistress in the female landlord of the halfway house, and the plot instead turns into a psychological tangle of the real and the pretend.
David Cronenberg’s Spider is one of those films that on the surface seems strange and unsettling, but gradually emerges as a much more complex masterpiece that sets the wheels in your brain into overdrive. Ralph Fiennes plays the tortured and mysterious Spider brilliantly in an undoubtedly challenging role.
Cronenberg’s incorporation of the adult Spider into his own childhood memories expertly creates a parallel of the character at both ages, showing that perhaps Spider is still just his adolescent self, trapped inside an adult body. In true Cronenberg style, the film is a psychological thriller with undercurrents of horror that shine through in both the past and present.
Spider marks Canadian legend David Cronenberg’s fourth appearance in the countdown and fits nicely into his impressive repertoire of mind-bending horror features. It’s unpredictable, deeply fascinating, and a thought-provoking journey of a film.
- Pamela Galbraith
“Cold as the film may seem, Cronenberg's nightmare talent has rarely been at such a high, terrifying boil.” - (Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune)
To see the other films in the countdown so far, click here.