Reality bites




By Tim Robey
The Telegraph
Arts Section
May 22, 2002
Tim Robey reviews Spider at the Cannes Festival







 Hypnotic: Ralph Fiennes gives an artful turn as the mentally disturbed hero of David Cronenberg's new film Spider




David Cronenberg's small but perfectly formed Spider, adapted by Patrick McGrath from his own book, is another essential addition to a highly esteemed corpus, and a change of pace to boot. It converts McGrath's stealthily grotesque nightmare of Freudian recall, with its typically unreliable narrative, into something hypnotic, still and restrained. Ralph Fiennes - in a highly artful turn that necessarily slows the material down to a crawl - is the shuffling, mumbling Dennis Clegg, at a half-way house for the mentally disturbed, who keeps stepping back into his childhood to stand watchfully in the background. Miranda Richardson is his mother, and - in the film's most expressionistic and sinister device - she progressively takes over the other female roles, including the blonde floozy who seduces Dennis's father (Gabriel Byrne). Cronenberg valiantly resists what must have been the major temptation: to find a visual correlative for Dennis's inwardly imagined transformation into a spider. Instead, he lets the actors (Richardson, in particular, is utterly commanding), the subtly illogical flashbacks, and Howard Shore's suggestive music do the work.

 

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