Spider (2002 film)
| Spider | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | David Cronenberg |
| Produced by | David Cronenberg Samuel Hadida Catherine Bailey |
| Screenplay by | Patrick McGrath |
| Based on |
Spider by Patrick McGrath |
| Starring |
Ralph Fiennes Miranda Richardson Gabriel Byrne |
| Music by | Howard Shore |
| Cinematography | Peter Suschitzky |
| Edited by | Ronald Sanders |
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Production
company |
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| Distributed by | Sony Pictures Classics |
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Release date
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Running time
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98 minutes |
| Country | Canada United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $10 million |
| Box office | $5,808,941 |
Spider is a 2002 Canadian/British psychological thriller-drama 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 cinemas 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.
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 buildup 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, although the final shot appears to show his true mother lying dead so we are left to wonder whether she really was his mother and the prostitute was just a fantasy. After that memory he sneaks late one night to the landlady's room and appears ready to kill her, whom he sees alternatively as the mistress, his mother and the landlady, but backs away after she says, "What have you done Mr. Cleg?" He is taken back to the asylum.
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