Spoilers
SPIDER is a micro-movie (few characters, claustrophobic setting, etc) that is just too simple for its own good. The really amazing thing about it (positive or negative, you pick) is that nothing happens for one whole hour. I looked at the vcr display and it showed 59 minutes and NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING happened yet. Phew! Ralph basically is basically a mute, so don't expect him to utter any dialogue. Nothing happens in the present. Most of the drama occurs in the flashback scenes, when Spider is a kid. And this is when and where the film fails.
The little kid was a good actor but because almost all of the drama occurs in the mind of someone who's a schizophrenic, we don't really know what's real and what's the product of the kid's imagination. The crux of the story is about sex (of course) and it's WAY too simplistic: the kid goes to pub to tell his father that supper is ready. In the pub, the kid meets this scary tarty woman, who shows him one of her breasts. This terrifies him. When later on the boy sees his mother in her slip, he suddenly gets aroused but when his mother catches him staring at her, he's shamed. From this point on, we're dealing with the kid's schizophrenic imagination: Spider is so ashamed that he was caught looking at his mother in a sexual way that he imagines his mother is now the tarty woman. He does this by imagining his father having an affair with the tart (the mom and the tart are both played by Miranda Richardson) and imagines his father killing his mother, only to have her replaced by the scary tart. Spider's burgeoning puberty, mixed with schizophrenia (caused by the fumes from the gas plant?), makes him see his mother as the tart, not the sweet gentle mother he knew before his hormones took over him. So when he eventually decides to kill the tart, in the end, Spider actually killed his mother, because the tart never lived with his father. That's what the adult Spider realizes when he was about to kill Mrs. Wilkinson, who, like his mother, had suddenly turned into the tart and when Spider was about to kill the tarty version of Mrs. Wilkinson in her bed, he found the real Mrs. Wilkinson (played by Lynn Redgrave) there and not the Mrs. Wilkinson played by Richardson. Wow. How simple! Spider goes back to the big house, just like where he was before the start of the movie, before he was released to the halfway house.
Because we can't connect with Spider as an adult, and because we can't connect with Spider's past because most of it is imaginary, by the end of the movie, I was pretty much indifferent towards everything.
The whole film is still admirable but it is way too simplistic AND predictable. Nothing much happens and it's remarkably slow! The really good thing in SPIDER is the look and production design. I loved it. I was so immersed in it that when I stopped watching the movie, I felt that I was still in it (I watch the film on a very dark and rainy afternoon). But as far as the film's story, well, it was too minimalistic and the mobius strip storyline (you can imagine Spider repeatedly going back to and out of the halfway house over and over again as he goes over the murky details of the death of his mother) that it's just not enough for me to say that it's great or even successful, as a drama or even as a symbolic work of art.
SPIDER is a micro-movie (few characters, claustrophobic setting, etc) that is just too simple for its own good. The really amazing thing about it (positive or negative, you pick) is that nothing happens for one whole hour. I looked at the vcr display and it showed 59 minutes and NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING happened yet. Phew! Ralph basically is basically a mute, so don't expect him to utter any dialogue. Nothing happens in the present. Most of the drama occurs in the flashback scenes, when Spider is a kid. And this is when and where the film fails.
The little kid was a good actor but because almost all of the drama occurs in the mind of someone who's a schizophrenic, we don't really know what's real and what's the product of the kid's imagination. The crux of the story is about sex (of course) and it's WAY too simplistic: the kid goes to pub to tell his father that supper is ready. In the pub, the kid meets this scary tarty woman, who shows him one of her breasts. This terrifies him. When later on the boy sees his mother in her slip, he suddenly gets aroused but when his mother catches him staring at her, he's shamed. From this point on, we're dealing with the kid's schizophrenic imagination: Spider is so ashamed that he was caught looking at his mother in a sexual way that he imagines his mother is now the tarty woman. He does this by imagining his father having an affair with the tart (the mom and the tart are both played by Miranda Richardson) and imagines his father killing his mother, only to have her replaced by the scary tart. Spider's burgeoning puberty, mixed with schizophrenia (caused by the fumes from the gas plant?), makes him see his mother as the tart, not the sweet gentle mother he knew before his hormones took over him. So when he eventually decides to kill the tart, in the end, Spider actually killed his mother, because the tart never lived with his father. That's what the adult Spider realizes when he was about to kill Mrs. Wilkinson, who, like his mother, had suddenly turned into the tart and when Spider was about to kill the tarty version of Mrs. Wilkinson in her bed, he found the real Mrs. Wilkinson (played by Lynn Redgrave) there and not the Mrs. Wilkinson played by Richardson. Wow. How simple! Spider goes back to the big house, just like where he was before the start of the movie, before he was released to the halfway house.
Because we can't connect with Spider as an adult, and because we can't connect with Spider's past because most of it is imaginary, by the end of the movie, I was pretty much indifferent towards everything.
The whole film is still admirable but it is way too simplistic AND predictable. Nothing much happens and it's remarkably slow! The really good thing in SPIDER is the look and production design. I loved it. I was so immersed in it that when I stopped watching the movie, I felt that I was still in it (I watch the film on a very dark and rainy afternoon). But as far as the film's story, well, it was too minimalistic and the mobius strip storyline (you can imagine Spider repeatedly going back to and out of the halfway house over and over again as he goes over the murky details of the death of his mother) that it's just not enough for me to say that it's great or even successful, as a drama or even as a symbolic work of art.