SPIDER

Dennis Cage has serious mental issues. He must reconstruct his past to attempt recovery and, above all, to find answers, the truth, the meaning of a life that has slipped from his grasp. Around him, desolation and madness, in his soul, emptiness. From here begins the search, the journey through the faces of his childhood, the abuses of a selfish and cruel father, the affection of a lonely and abandoned mother, the fear and spider webs as the only means to build a cage to protect himself from the pains of the outside world. Then one day the bitter truth, the terrible act of a father who loses every symptom of rationality, and the horror seen through the eyes of a child, and simultaneously through the eyes of an adult who materializes in the places of his childhood misadventures. And the horror that spreads from the past to the present, through a woman's face that becomes an unpleasant face of tyranny and murder, and that seals the final loss of every hope of recovery. Dennis 'Spider' condemned to oblivion, to the psychiatric hospital, to a life closed in the cocoon of spider webs. The last work of master David Cronenberg is a difficult film, it must be said from the start. Difficult to understand, to follow, and perhaps above all to accept for fans of an author who over the years has managed to impose his poetic and cinematic ideas to the point of making them unique and unmistakable. Here there is no mutilated flesh, no body mutation, no clinical horror of blood drawn and contaminated. Rather, it is the mutation of the spirit that is explored, the madness and human solitude, the need for family stability as a necessary means to aspire to a normal life, the confusion of past and present until losing every consciousness of self and every boundary between truth and imagination. A film that critics have already defined as 'Kafkaesque', a film of atmosphere and tension, built on the narrative progression of a truth that seems to surface little by little and that in the surprising ending instead overturns every prediction, a film played on the suffering face and vacant gaze of a brilliant Ralph Fiennes, who stutters incomprehensible half-words (an element of great effect that will surely be lost in the Italian dubbing) and who fills the screen with extreme close-ups shot from below, placing him at the center of every thought and as an inept being in the face of the squalid and ineluctable reality that surrounds him. This is 'Spider', which in its one and a half hours of duration passes quickly, leaving some perplexity. A good job if considered as a filmic work in its autonomy, substantially well written and well directed, but probably disappointing if compared to the genius of Cronenberg, a film that manages to convey great tension but does not reach the heights of masterpieces by the Canadian director such as 'The Fly', 'Dead Ringers', and 'Crash'. Perhaps it would have been a great film if directed by another director, but from Cronenberg, with a theme far from his standards (based on the novel by Patrick McGrath) but still fascinating, one could have expected a few more touches of the author. Instead, 'Spider' is solid, concrete, classic, claustrophobic to the right point, but perhaps soulless. In any case, a film that makes you discuss, and that should be seen anyway. On the verge of sufficiency.