Web of an invisible man

David Cronenberg's Spider is a depressant. It's meant to be, of course.

Most of the story, adapted by Patrick McGrath from his own novel, focuses on a Freudian nightmare of childhood seen through the eyes of the grown man just released from long confinement in a lunatic asylum, and returning to a London so deliberately stylised into tones of greyness and spartan despair that it looks both minimalist and Dickensian. Ralph Fiennes plays the eponymous Spider, billeted in an East End "halfway house" run by a rule-obsessed landlady (Miranda Richardson).

Like Spider's arachnid namesake, he compulsively threads his cell-like room with strands of cotton and spins his memories from the still centre of observation posts in alleyways, pubs and soup kitchens.

He watches himself as a small boy, and sees the family tragedy replayed: a father (Gabriel Byrne) having it off with a cheap tart (Miranda Richardson again), the impulsive murder of his mother (Miranda Richardson yet again) on an allotment after catching her husband in flagrante - the primal scene enacted with terminal consequences.

It is a film that is steeped in deep distress. Fiennes for long stretches does nothing but watch. We are not sure if what he sees is his own imagining of events, or the events themselves.

It will remind Terence Davies fans of that director's Distant Voices, Still Lives - an acknowledged influence - though stripped of all the compensatory blessings that Davies found in his own disturbed childhood.

Perhaps Samuel Beckett is an even more dominant influence in both the spareness of the production design - by Andrew Sanders - and Peter Suschitzky's uncompromising camerawork.

Fiennes, mumbling almost incoherently to himself whenever he has any dialogue, gives a non-verbal performance so self-effacing that the actor is virtually the "invisible man" of the scenes he inhabits without anyone noticing him.

Miranda Richardson's tripartite performance would seem flashy were her talents not so controlled and Cronenberg's graduated revelation of the grotesque-within-theordinary so self-denying. It may seem too much so for some people, who prefer him in his Crash mode.

But though the film lacks physical grotesqueness, Cronenberg's cinematic signature, it generates an unease that is not so easily dismissed as the product of make-up artists.

Its horrors are interior. In it lurks the terror of recovered memory and, even worse, of unreliable memory: the sight and sound of a past without catharsis.

Spider
Cert: 15