| 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 |
| Editing by | Ronald Sanders |
| Studio | Catherine Bailey Ltd. Grosvenor Park Productions Davis Films Metropolitan Films Redbus Pictures |
| Distributed by | Sony Pictures Classics |
| Release date(s) | December 13, 2002 (CAN) January 3, 2003 (UK) February 28, 2003 (US) |
| Running time | 98 minutes |
| Country | Canada United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $10 million |
| Box office | $5,808,941 |
Spider is a 2002 Canadian/British 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[1] 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.
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 fund the under-funded production.
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Spider is an exploration of a schizophrenic mind told through the eyes of a grown man who is given a room in a house catering for mentally disturbed persons. The man 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 with his mother and his father. Set in 1950s London, exterior shots were made at Kennington for the gas towers and Pullens buildings in Walworth made the exterior for 'Pegge Street'. In this visualization, 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 his mistress 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 to kill the landlady who, by then, he sees alternatively as the mistress and his mother. He is taken back to the asylum. By the end of the film it seems that his father did not kill his mother, but that the murder happened in the child's mind who had already started losing his sense of reality and imagined it. There is no clear indication whether his killing of his mother whom he imagined as the mistress, actually happened. Central themes of the film include memory, the unreliability thereof, and the blur between reality and hallucination. The main character often places himself within his memories.
Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 85% based on reviews from 126 critics.[2] On Metacritic, the film had an average score of 83 out of 100, based on 35 reviews.[3]
It was mentioned in the 2002 Sight & Sound Poll by Amy Taubin, who ranked it at 10th.[4]
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