Spider

powerful. convincing. uncomfortable. or only a Cronenberg. admirable performances. and the wise science to use the plot possibilities in the right directions. a film about illness. or about illusion. or the need to escape from yourself. not original but perfect made. and this did it the perfect choice for the admirers of genre or director. short, one of films who remains in memory as the precise portrait of a state. who could be defined in many ways. but this is the source of fascination. a murder. and the looking for truth. different clues. and the deep solitude. and nothing more. that is all.

Ralph F could hardly be heard. I was bored after 5 minutes, waiting for something to catch my interest and nothing did during the whole movie. I should have spent the evening watching the chicken rotisserie or the faucet drip--at least I wouldn't have felt manipulated.

of spending money and wasting the time of everyone involved to make this film. It was very dull. And hardly anything happens. Most of the movie is we see what happened to Spider as a kid. His mind was deluded then (SPOILERS): At first, we think Spider's dad killed his mom to marry another woman. But, I guess it was young Spider who killed her and he got sent off to the asylum. Fiennes speech was horrible. I may have understood 5 words of what his character says. It was just mumbling. The whole time you kept waiting for something to happen, but it never does. It leads you to believe Spider is going to go psycho and start killing at his bording home. But, about all he does is string rope up like spider webs, steel keys, and hoover over the ole lady's bed with a hammer. FINAL VERDICT: The whole movie was a big let down. Don't bother seeing this.

Cronenberg's film about a mentally disturbed man(Fiennes) who snaps back into a state of reality as he takes residence in a halfway house. He replays a key part of his childhood which leads him into a mysterious path of trying to find a sense for reality. Fiennes is very good here, although the film is a bit weird at times and not always interesting. Its not bad from a stylistic perspective, however the screenplay is iffy at points and boring sometimes. The performances and good direction save this film from being a failure. I thought if the screenplay was put together in a more powerful way, then perhaps it could have been better, but McGrath couldn't translate the interesting points of his novel to screen. IMDb Rating: 6.8, my rating: 8/10

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.

Really a challenging try you should do! Why i called like that, because of when the movie started, you feel how a movie can be so slow pacing. When lots of mumblings leaking from the Ralph's mouth, you can ask yourself where i am and what i'm doing here? But you should wait till the end come out for sure. This is a completely different movie experience which made me speechless. Looking for easy entertaining like an action flick or a comedy, do not try this one!!! But if you look for a movie as an art and science, you should catch this one. When i said "art and science", i mean how a movie can be literary and can be a medical experience also. Btw, i have to point the tag-line of the Spider which is one of the best tag-line i've ever seen. When the end came, i felt the depth of the sadness of the spider. Great acting and directing!!!

This is very unlike the usual Cronenberg movie. It's a beautifully directed low-key study of "Spider", a strange mentally ill man trying to understand the world, and in particular his past. Ralph Fiennes plays Spider to absolute perfection. He does not act the part of Spider, he IS Spider. It is a truly magnificent performance. It makes Russell Crowe's performance in Beautiful Mind look like that of a first year acting student. The film is ambitious in showing us the world from Spider's point of view, fantasies and all. In the end, I felt that the story of Spider's childhood - where the extent of Spider's construction of reality is explored - was a little too simplistic to fully portray Spider's universe. Nevertheless, an impressive film.