Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

ScoobyWell Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The Couchpotatoes I am a fan of David Cronenberg's work but I disagree with some other reviewers that write Spider is his best movie. Don't get me wrong, it isn't bad at all but it was just a bit slow and sometimes too confusing to me. If there was one thing that was really good in Spider then it was the performance of Ralph Fiennes. He plays his role as the mentally disturbed Spider very well. The rest of the cast did a good job as well. Nothing bad to say about any of the actors. Even though the story is sometimes confusing at the end you get most of the answers. Some that you did see coming by the way. All in all it was a good movie to watch once but saying it's David Cronenberg's best is a bit exaggerated.

jpdhadfield i caught this on telly, luckily i could record it,as it quite long and dull, i was intrigued, but not enough to watch it in one sitting, long expanses of nothing happening, which maybe true of most mentally ill people, but very boring to watch, the twist at the end, explains it all, but not enough to bother watching it.The acting is good, and Fiennes plays mad very well, and we've all seen people like this in town, muttering to themselves, spoiler alert, im not sure about the halfway house, as its supposed to be nowadays, but it looked very 1970's as health and safety would never allow a home like that,and building sites in the passed didn't have mesh fencing around them, i wouldn't recommend this film to anybody ,unless they liked film noir,reminded me of Swedish films on bbc 2, years ago,

Desertman84 Internal madness is hypnotically externalized in David Cronenberg's Spider, a disturbing portrait of schizophrenia that was adapted by Patrick McGrath from his celebrated novel.This drama stars Ralph Fiennes,Miranda Richardson and Gabriel Byrne.The film is a 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 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 late one night to kill the landlady who sees alternatively as the mistress and his mother, he is taken back to the asylum.Cronenberg pieces together a compelling portrait of madness, but one which lacks the poignancy to be a rich, moving character study.Aside from that,it fails to connect with its audience and concludes in a contradictory and jumbled fashion.But despite of its flaws,this is one of the director's most accomplished films as it remains a pleasure to watch in such an understated treatment of potentially sensational subject matter.Also,Ralph Fiennes provides a brilliant and startling performance as a mentally ill person.

itamarscomix Spider marks David Cronenberg's inevitable move from body horror and dark fantasy into more realistic (if that term can be used) realms, and further into the human psych, even more so than 1996's Crash. Over the following decade Cronenberg would go on to make A History of Violence, Eastern Promises and A Dangerous Method, three films which would move further away from the body and into the mind, into the roots of human violence and psychosis, and all three would achieve more commercial success than anything Cronenberg made before. Spider isn't quite as communicative as those three, and it suffers from some pacing problems, but by its own right it's a fascinating film and a unique one in Cronenberg's filmography.Spider has many flaws, but it excels wonderfully in two aspects. First, a truly powerful twist ending, which never feels far-fetched, and in fact can be anticipated some time in advance by an observant viewer, and yet manages to shock even if you knew it was coming, much more so than most famous twists in more recent films. Second, in that it creates real tension and interest while nothing much ever really happens on screen (and in that regard it's easy to compare it to Shutter Island, which is based around some similar themes, with a much more complex and contrived plot and with a much less effective ending). It doesn't always work; the pacing is off sometimes and some parts of the films drag by and lose the viewer's interest. It takes a lot of patience to go through, more than classic Cronenberg fantasies like Videodrome or The Fly, and more than the more fast-paced A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. But it's more rewarding in its own way, and the ending is good enough that you might want to watch it a second time.