Spider: David Cronenberg

Spider is endemic of a problem that I've begun to have with David Cronenberg's more recent work.  Quite simply, Spider, much like many of his latest releases, is a film that somebody other than Cronenberg could have made.  It's not because Spider is based on the Patrick McGrath novel of the same name. After all, Cronenberg is no stranger to filming stories written by somebody else.  The problem is that somebody else could have taken the exact same script and made the exact same film. From the start of his career all the way up to the start of the new millennium, Cronenberg mostly made movies that only he could dream up.  Who other than David Cronenberg could dream up a story like the one in Videodrome (1983)? Who other than David Cronenberg could have adapted William S. Burroughs' "Naked Lunch?" Who other than David Cronenberg could make films that elevated the body horror genre to the level of art?  So his film Spider annoys me because it started the trend that lasted throughout the 2000s of Cronenberg making other people's films.  But let's put all of that aside for now and just focus on the film.  Spider follows Dennis "Spider" Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) a schizophrenic Englishman with a torturous childhood. The film begins as Dennis arrives at a halfway house for the mentally disturbed following his release from a mental institution where he has supposedly spent most of his life.  He slowly begins to reconstruct his past and the horrific events that led to his original incarceration as a child.  Like the novel, the film is notorious for its unreliable narrator.  When Dennis experiences flashbacks, we are unsure whether or not they really happened or if they were invented by his sick mind. Cronenberg accentuates this problem by having the adult Dennis physically present as an unseen observer in his own childhood memories.  Even more curiously, the adult Dennis is an observer in memories that he couldn't have witnessed in the first place because he wasn't present for them as a child.  I won't spoil the mystery, but it involves his mother's supposed death at the hands of his father. While Cronenberg's narrative techniques are fascinating, the film is surprisingly dull and sterile. We feel no affection or interest in the mystery because Dennis doesn't seem to care either.  The film isn't poorly made, it just isn't very interesting. Cronenberg's other films of the 2000s would rapidly increase in quality. But there is still a petty part of me that resents Spider for what it did to Cronenberg's career.

6/10