Kayleigh Donaldson
If 2025 is guaranteed to be an absolute nightmare on practically every level, at least we are guaranteed one bright spot: the arrival of a new David Cronenberg film. Not that Canada’s king of body horror is a director whose work promises a lot of escapist thrills. The Shrouds, which premiered at Cannes last year, follows the grief-ravaged work of a businessman who creates a form of corpse live-streaming that will allow people to monitor the dead bodies of their loved ones as they decay. You certainly can’t claim that Cronenberg isn’t adept at capturing the mood of the times.
Cronenberg’s quieter, somber, and less set-piece driven films tend to be pegged by critics as his lesser efforts. They’re also more likely to be denied the label of “Cronenbergian”, or even mocked as his attempts at mainstream prestige. But these displays of Cronenberg’s oft-overlooked directorial versatility are still rooted in his distinct fascinations. One needn’t show a disintegrating Brundlefly to fully embody the terrors of body horror. Case in point: Spider.
Based on a novel by Patrick McGrath, 2002’s Spider felt like it signaled the end of the ’80s and ’90s grotesqueries in favor of something more…. if not mainstream, then certainly easier to sell to the masses. At least, that’s how it looked on paper. Spider starred Ralph Fiennes as Dennis Cleg, nicknamed Spider, a troubled man with schizophrenia who has just been released from a mental institution. He moves into a halfway home for troubled individuals and tries to piece together the fractured memories of his childhood in the 1950s. He finds himself obsessing over a time when his father Bill (Gabriel Byrne) murdered his saintly mother (Miranda Richardson) and replaced her with his bawdy sex worker mistress (also played by Miranda Richardson).
Cronenberg may be most beloved for his exploding heads and sexy car crashes but it’s the sense of absolute oppressiveness that makes his most terrifying work so unforgettable. Spider’s life is ceaselessly bleak. The halfway house looks like a gothic haunted house crossed with the kitchen sink realism of working-class British cinema. Everything is grimy, from the surfaces to Spider’s dirty fingernails. This is a place where it seems likely that the sun has never shone. It might be the most suffocating setting of any Cronenberg film. There’s no easy way out for the viewer. If Spider can’t escape, neither can we.
Richardson plays the two women who dominate Spider’s childhood: his pristine “good” housewife mother and the “bad” mistress who swears, drinks, and radiates lust. It’s a doppelganger story that makes for an interesting companion piece to Cronenberg’s other famous twins movie, Dead Ringers. Her presence looms over Spider’s life, both a precious memory and a tainted nightmare. The reasoning behind this double casting is slowly revealed, mirroring Spider’s splintered memory trying to form a cohesive and undoubtable truth. Even then, this is a man who has for so long been separated from reality, unable to rule his own life that he seems ambivalent about whether or not any of it matters. He lives within a hell not of his own making but of a genetic quirk. It’s an internal body horror, one no less grotesque than that of the viscera-laden hellscapes of Cronenberg films past.
Spider was the first film of Cronenberg’s 2000s, a time where he seemed interested in exploring things that would be deemed as uncharacteristic of his past work by critics, including A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Works that seemed straightforward in theme and tone quickly revealed pricklier and more unnerving cores. None of that happens without the ideas he explored in Spider, a striking stopgap between Cronenberg eras that deserves far more than to be dismissed as a “lesser effort” than what came before it.
In his review, Roger Ebert admitted that he felt “more admiration than gratitude” while watching Spider because “the story has no entry or exit, and is cold, sad and hopeless.” It is certainly a more knowingly nihilistic work than Cronenberg’s more famous films. The Fly is practically operatic in its grand tragedy but you also feel immense empathy for Seth Brundle as his body mutates. James Woods is hardly a hero in Videodrome but he’s a charming jerk whose stumble into a psycho-political takeover is rooted in a dangerous yet tangible philosophy. With Spider, what we have is trauma where the sufferer doesn’t get any better, doesn’t feel closure by the time he uncovers the truth, and doesn’t ever seem happy. It’s possible he’s never been happy once in his life. It’s a tough and airless world to inhabit and one far more burdensome than the more traditional Cronenberg works. There’s no distancing via speculative elements like The Brood or cold, deliberately unnaturalistic dialogue and performances as seen in Crash. Maybe it’s too real. Isn’t that true body horror?
“Spider” is available for digital rental or purchase.
