Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Cooktopi The acting in this movie is really good.

Orla Zuniga It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

joecoby45 Spider is a very unique film in regards to how it tells its story. Unconventional doesn't even do it justice. Without spoiling anything Spider is about mental illness. The basic premise is that a man who has just been released from an asylum and put into a home is recreating events from his childhood that led to a great tragedy. Throughout the movie you are constantly wondering what is/was real and what is/was fantasy. Its very intriguing.My only real gripe with the film is that it drags every now and again. There are too many scenes that go on longer then they need to with unnecessary padding. Perhaps if it had been trimmed by about 15 or so minutes it would be perfect. Still definitely worth a watch if your into the more weird indie stuff. Plus the performances are just fantastic. Ralph Fiennes has practically no dialogue throughout the film but still manages to have a great presence and create an interesting character. He is truly one our finest. Miranda Richardson and Gabriel Byrne also excel in their supporting roles.

Lele Much more disturbing than Videodrome (1983), showing almost nothing else than the desperate face of the brilliant Fiennes, this movie is a shocking portrait of mental illness. Namely the Capgras delusion syndrome, a real rare mental disorder. Main symptoms are the misidentification of people, places and even time. This movie depicts in a extrahordinary effective way the paranoid schizophrenia of the main character. One of the best movie I've seen about psychiatric conditions. A must see. My favorite Cronenberg movie came shortly after: A History of Violence (2005)

FlashCallahan Dennis Clegg is in his thirties and lives in a halfway house for the mentally disturbed in London.Dennis, nicknamed "Spider" by his mother, had been institutionalised with acute schizophrenia for some 20 years.He has never truly recovered, and as he begins to remember his past, people around him vicariously experience his increasingly fragile grip on reality.....For a Cronenberg film, it's a very different path the director has taken, it's probably one of the most narratively straight forward films he has made during his illustrious career.You could view it as Cronenberg does a Kitchen Sink Drama, or the most depressing episode of Mr. Bean you could ever wish not to see. But the last comment would be totally unfair on Feinnes, because he puts in wonderful, almost muted performance as the titular character.The past is most definitely the most interesting part of the film, as the story centres on Dennis's dad, played wonderfully by Byrne. Fiennes may put in a wonderful performance, but Mr. Clegg is most certainly the most interesting, fleshed out character in the film, and sometimes it feel like Spider is only featured in the film so we can follow Mr. Cleggs arc feasibly.Mr. Clegg is sadly facing midlife crisis, slowly coming to the understanding that this is his life, and this is how it's going to be for a very long time, so he begins an extra marital affair with what appears to be a doppelganger of his wife, played brilliantly by Richardson.And this is where the film gets interesting as we begin to realise that What's affected spider is something that he saw from his bedroom window, something that all children dread to see, Their parents being amorous toward each other.This is where the film asks the question, Is Mr. Clegg having an affair, or are the couple simply spicing up their personal life, and the scene at the allotment is nothing more than a metaphor for saying goodbye to the old life.But obviously Spider's fragile mind id seeing it from the former perspective, and his mother is no longer the innocent angel he once saw her as, but as a totally different person, thanks to that few seconds when he saw her with his dad.It's very Freudian in it's nature, and it does take a lot of patience, but Cronenberg has made a wonderfully subtle film.

Andrew Wakely An absolutely crushing bore, I held on to the bitter end, waiting and hoping for a twist or a revelation and was soundly disappointed. A film about a man newly arrived at a half-way house after being released from the asylum, Spider is a dreary portrait of a schizophrenic who mumbles, broods, smokes heavily and scribbles gibberish into a notebook, all the while going over tragic memories from his childhood-- including the murder of his beloved mother by his boozy, loutish father, and his own murder of his father's new wife by gas poisoning, while she lay passed out in a chair.All in all, Ralph Fiennes decent portrayal of a troubled mind was not near enough to keep this story afloat. Feeling very unlike the Cronenburg pictures I know and respect, Spider could have been a truly depressing film. Instead we are treated to a long, boring movie with a non-ending, and absolutely nothing positive to be gleaned from it's content.