‘Spider’ spins a dark tale of torment

Sometime in the 1980s a shabbily dressed, disturbed young man exits a train in a vast station so furtively and with such hesitance that he at first seems either in a weakened condition or somehow physically disabled. Neither is the case.

This first image of Ralph Fiennes’ Dennis Cleg is unsettling, to say the least, and a harbinger of things to come in “Spider,” David Cronenberg’s compelling and provocative film of Patrick McGrath’s adaptation of his 1988 novel. In an instance of director, stars and material melding flawlessly, “Spider” is a brilliantly realized depiction of a mentally ill individual unexpectedly confronted with his past in a manner that suggests the seemingly infinite capacity of the mind for distortion in the name of self-protection.

Cronenberg has pulled off a richly visual feat of the imagination that ranks among his finest achievements and draws full measure of the talent and skill of Miranda Richardson (in a breathtaking dual portrayal), Gabriel Byrne, Lynn Redgrave and John Neville as well as Fiennes. He has made equal demands of his crew, which includes most prominently cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, production designer Andrew Sanders, costume designer Denise Cronenberg and composer Howard Shore, all of whose contributions in creating the gray, somber universe in which this complex and contradictory psychological odyssey takes place cannot be overpraised.

With intense effort at concentration, Cleg makes his way, with the wariness and tentativeness that will mark almost all his actions, to a seemingly endless swath of identical Victorian row houses in a section of east London so far from the city’s center that it borders on countryside. He finally arrives at the correct address, which proves to be an unmarked and surprisingly large halfway house run by the severe Mrs. Wilkinson, a cold upholder of rules and regulations, a cousin of Nurse Ratched except that her passion for control is limited by the fact that her residents, all of them male, are free to come and go as they please.

The environment of the halfway house is shabby and minimalist in the extreme, and it hasn’t had a fresh coat of paint since between the wars if not before. Neville’s elderly Terrence greets Cleg kindly but can’t resist telling him about a man in Africa who took 17 agonized hours to die from the bite of a scorpion. Withdrawn and recalcitrant, Cleg eventually starts wandering around the neighborhood, which happens to be where he lived with his parents as a child. It is a stark, alienating area of row houses hard by a canal and a looming gasworks with vast reservoirs; an immense arched brick bridge slices one vista.

In time he comes upon his drab childhood home, and in peering through its dining room window he sees himself (played by a subtly creepy Bradley Hall) seated at the dinner table with his father (Byrne), a plumber who seems to spend most of his evenings at a nearby pub even though his wife (Richardson) is an attractive, warm, accommodating woman. From a seamless flow of images moving between a real present and an imagined past, Cronenberg has driven home his things-aren’t-necessarily-what-they-seem observation with a peculiar force that is characteristic of his dark vision of human nature. Cronenberg is too sophisticated an artist and too much the master of the enigma and of confused sexuality to spell everything out, and it may well be that the most revealing moment of the film is when little Dennis observes his mother in a slip she says she hopes will please his father.

There is no Gothic horror in “Spider” but instead a portrait of a man with a shattered mind striving compulsively with all his might to make sense of and survive in an indifferent world. With remarkable persuasiveness Fiennes and Cronenberg illuminate the workings of this tormented man’s mind, impaired yet functional in its weird but comprehensible logic.

Cronenberg has said of Spider, which is Cleg’s nickname, that he is “so strange ... and yet oddly familiar, and even more so these days when the world’s streets are filled with the ‘homeless,’ each of whom has a specific story to tell about ‘home.’ ” The way in which Cronenberg tells Cleg’s story and what we discover home means to him are what make “Spider” so disturbingly evocative.

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‘Spider’

MPAA rating: Rated R, for sexuality, brief violence, language.

Times guidelines: The film is far too intense for children even if accompanied by parents.

Ralph Fiennes...Dennis “Spider” Cleg

Miranda Richardson...Mrs. Cleg

Gabriel Byrne...Bill Cleg

Lynn Redgrave...Mrs. Wilkinson

John Neville...Terrence

Bradley Hall...Young Spider

A Sony Pictures Classics release. Director David Cronenberg. Producers Cronenberg, Samuel Hadida, Catherine Bailey. Executive producers Luc Roeg, Charles Finch, Martin Katz, Jane Barclay, Sharon Harel, Hannah Leader, Zygi Kamasa, Simon Franks, Victor Hadida. Screenplay by Patrick McGrath based on his novel. Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky. Editor Ronald Sanders. Music Howard Shore. Costumes Denise Cronenberg. I hour, 38 minutes.

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