Spider

Spider reminded me, and this is neither a good nor bad thing, but just a thing, that one of the many splendored beauties of film is it's capacity to tell stories in a near infinite number of ways. There aren't many films like Spider, few that tell a story in the careful manner it chooses to. Consequently it's a little challenging as watches go. And that is both a good and bad thing. It's some time before the films point raises it's head above the parapet to glare menacingly in your direction, prior to which you're left alone with 'Spider' and the strange world he inhabits.

Played by a remarkably stark and hollow looking Ralph Fiennes, "Spider" or Dennis Cleg is a recently released mental patient boarded in a halfway house, a place described by another resident as an island from the larger world. Far from free of his demons, he's a mumbling wreck of a man who spends the film shuffling through both the physical locations and the manifested memories of his childhood. It's here that a narrative arises from the ruins and thanks in large part to the excellent Miranda Richardson and Gabriel Byrne the film changes gear from ponderous to absorbing. As he begins to haunt his own past, silently baring witness to events, it becomes clear that we cannot truly trust the things that he sees. He's privy to elements he would not have seen and even those he may take on a subtle but important shift in their reality. As if to render some order to the things he sees he takes copious notes in a seemingly alien language composed of scribbles, perhaps believing that he can excise his illness by trapping it upon the pages of his notebook.

The films problem, and perhaps it's beauty is that it is comfortable with the audience being just as confused as Cleg himself. It's slowly made apparent that there is some method to his profound madness but it's an internal logic he alone can see. The intricate webs he builds from loose piece of scavenged string that give both him and the film their name are alluded to in his past but their exact nature is never covered. They seem to calm him as if they act as protection but we're left to guess as to why. Those things it does choose to explain we are often shown long before their reason has been established.

It makes it one of the most fascinating portrayals of madness I've ever come across, a delicate and memorable puzzle of a movie as fraught as the man's mind, but at the same time there is only so much of a movie during which one can sit and wonder what the devil is going on before the feeling that it is nonsense begins to creep in. Which I suppose it is, as an absence of sense is it's focus, but again we're back to that being both a good and bad thing.