Spider

Reviewed by PETER CALDER

Herald rating: * * * * *

The movies' grimmest portrait of demented isolation since Roman Polanski directed himself in The Tenant almost 30 years ago, the new film by Canadian horror-meister Cronenberg is probably his most purely cinematic yet.

It's an utterly specific glimpse inside the cavernous paranoid void of one man's head, yet it's suffused with a profound existential dread that makes it as soul-chilling as it is richly satisfying.

What's most remarkable is the way in which it evokes its main character's inner life by using external events which don't seem antic or forced or fantastical but rather wholly plausible.

They include a bath tap that gushes rust-brown water, a rumbling tank in a gasworks, the cackle of good-time girls in a pub which is indistinguishable from a demented shriek, a spider's web of string woven in a room.

The film is adapted by Patrick McGrath from his 1990 novel, a first-person narrative that cloaked its ravings in a chilling lucidity.

Cronenberg has found a sort of cinematic correlative of the unease the book generated by shifting so seamlessly between reality and his lead character's imaginings that we don't know until the shocking and desperately sad last stanza, which is which.

Spider is the childhood nickname of Dennis Cleg (Fiennes), a mumbling paranoid-schizophrenic thirtysomething discharged from a mental hospital after 20 years inside who fetches up in a halfway house in the East End. Here he scrawls in his own hieroglyphic script in a notebook and struggles to deal with the most desperate hideous irony of his situation: he grew up in this part of town.

The film has some fun in the halfway house: its proprietor (Redgrave) is waspish and bossy, and the residents include a man obsessed by the danger of scorpions, and another who supposes Sophia Loren has the hots for him.

But it's to Cleg's past that the film turns its attention, trolling back through it until it snags on the horror that unhinged him in the first place. It is depicted, or rather disentangled, with a clinical precision. It's best not to hint at it here, but it's fair to say the lad did not have a happy childhood.

Fiennes' performance is beyond praise. It's an understated bravura in which we are constantly aware of the acting yet constantly transported by it. Richardson is perfectly cast - it only hints at the story to say she plays two roles and is a stand-in in a third. And the music by Howard Shore, who scored The Lord of the Rings, adds to the deep sense of desolation and unease.

This is not exactly a date movie. It's even, perhaps, best undertaken with a nip or two of whisky under the belt. But it's a deeply impressive piece of work by a director and cast all at the top of their game.

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, Lynn Redgrave

Director: David Cronenberg

Running time: 98 mins

Rating: R13 (violence, offensive language, sex scenes)

Screening: Rialto