Spider, director David Cronenberg's first film since 1999's eXistenZ, lacks the surrealism, horror, and oozing body parts that mark much of his work. Instead, it is an elegant and austere drama, adapted by Patrick McGrath from his own novel about a schizophrenic's mental journey back to the place where his madness began. It becomes more obviously a Cronenberg film as its themes develop, and represents the filmmaker's latest examination of perception versus reality.
When Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) is thrust back into his former East London neighborhood after his release from a mental hospital, he finds old ghosts beckoning. As he steps out from Mrs. Wilkinson's (Lynn Redgrave) halfway house, memories flood back to him. In order to combat these personal demons, he determines to write down a permanent record of what happened to his boyhood self, Spider (Bradley Hall), and his parents (Miranda Richardson and Gabriel Byrne) back in the 1950s.

Walking past the boarded-up buildings and towering gasworks that evoke his past, Cleg makes his way along the Thames, past the local pub and his childhood home. As he writes, he's inserted back into the old days, trailing just behind his younger self as a witness to Spider's growing unease, beginning when a pub slattern flashes her breasts at the boy. The reminiscences only grow darker from there, but how reliable a narrator is Cleg?

Fiennes gives one of his best performances yet in a role that requires him to be nearly mute. When he speaks at all, it is to mumble, not always intelligibly, since the words refuse to come out. Between the muttering, his greasy coat, and crabbed walk, he looks like another street person to be stepped around. But there is fear in his eyes that gradually shifts to paranoia as the space between his suspect memories and the world around him narrows until they are one and the same.

Unlike that other recent movie revolving around a schizophrenic, A Beautiful Mind, there is no uplift, no redemption in Spider. This is certainly a difficult film, requiring more from an audience than simply cheering for the hero. For one thing, there is no "hero," just one very damaged man. But, putting Hollywood-bred expectations aside, Cleg's struggle to find himself amid the confusion of his memories is a powerful, uncompromising drama. Maybe Cleg's mind may not be beautiful, but it certainly is mesmerizing.