Mind Game

Just saw David Cronenberg’s Spider. It is the story of a mentally distorted man who imagines that his father and his father’s mistress have killed her mother. But we figure out that he is in fact the one who killed his mother. In the beginning of the film Spider (Ralph Fiennes) is released from the jail and he enters a kind of nursing house where he mixes up the landlady with his father’s mistress. From some point on Cronenberg switches the actresses, meaning that Lynn Redgrave who plays the landlady, from some point is replace Miranda Richardson who plays both mother and the [imaginary] mistress and we the audience are quite receptive. The pattern in the movie—which is the embodiment of Spider’s disturbed—mind suggests that Spider has arrived to this house where the old mistress of his father is in charge. The audience is so deeply drawn into Spider’s mind that we do really believe this and even forget that the landlady had been played by another actress just half an hour before in the film. It is a brilliant puzzle, set together in a most miniaturist manner. It drags the audience into a mind game, like a spider web and then suddenly tears the web apart and the audience collapses.

The movie begins very slow and not much tings happening. I should say that I was bored in the first 30-40 minutes of the film. But when one watches the film to the end, one realizes that it actually need that beginning in order to build the entire rhythm of the piece. And the rhythm is fantastic: the camera movement, the acting, the light, the music all in all make a great rhythm. And last, but not least, Ralph Fiennes is superb in this film. I did not like his acting in most of the other movies he played in. He gives me a bad feeling as if he is pouring his emotional expression on me. Although he was very good in The Sunshine, but Spider is the best acting I have seen from Ralph Fiennes.