Spider (15)

Come into Cronenberg's web of fear

Who else but David Cronenberg would add Spider to a CV that already includes The Fly? This new film has nothing like the Kafka-esque nightmare of Jeff Goldblum slimily sprouting wings and bug eyes, but it is in its way as dark and disquieting. It actually bears closer resemblance to the film Cronenberg made after The Fly, the masterly Dead Ringers, inasmuch as both are horror stories about being human: they are case studies of sexual dread and mental collapse.

Spider is based on the 1991 novel by Patrick McGrath, which offered good news and bad. The book is a fiendish venture into modern Gothic, but confidence in Cronenberg as a literary adapter has been on the wane. While one admired the nerve that could take on Naked Lunch and J G Ballard's Crash, it only confirmed the principle that some books were not meant to be filmed. At first I wondered if Spider might belong to that category too. It recounts the story of Dennis "Spider" Cleg (Ralph Fiennes), lately returned to his native London after years inside a home for the criminally insane. Installed in a shabby East End halfway house a few streets from where he once lived, Spider is borne back into the past and the defining trauma of his boyhood.

The young Spider (played by Bradley Hall) is a withdrawn and solitary child, devoted to his mother (Miranda Richardson) but deeply suspicious of his morose father, Bill (Gabriel Byrne). In time the boy comes to believe that his father, in order to move a blowzy trollop named Yvonne into their home, has murdered his mother and buried her in a nearby allotment. That Yvonne, mutton dressed in leopardskin, is also played by Miranda Richardson adds an ominous note of doubt to the domestic imbroglio, which the adult Spider now relives in troubled flashbacks. Did he really know Yvonne at all? And why is he tormented by the smell of gas? Little by little the film nudges us towards the heart of the matter as the fragile web of Spider's diseased imaginings comes agonisingly apart.

The last film to dramatise the mischievous delusions of schizophrenia was Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind, where men in dark suits and big cars are later revealed to be figments of Russell Crowe's imagination. Whatever pity that elicited was eventually squandered by the soothing fiction that mental suffering is but a step on the road to fulfilment. Spider is a corrective to such glozing, perhaps even an apology for it. Much of its pathos resides in an extraordinary performance by Ralph Fiennes in the title role.

Patrick McGrath's script, refusing the easy option of a voiceover, instead puts the onus on Fiennes to suggest what kind of state Spider's not-so-beautiful mind is in. The outward signs of inner tumult are plain to see: a stooped, shuffling walk, trembling, nicotine-stained fingers, and eyes so haunted they cannot meet anybody else's. (His bed-head hair is allegedly inspired by Samuel Beckett, who I imagine would rather have liked this movie.) Fiennes played schizoid in the recent adaptation of Thomas Harris's Red Dragon, a role that demanded a certain demonic flamboyance. His masterstroke here is really about what he withholds. Only at the end does it strike you that Spider, for all his mumbling, hasn't uttered a single complete sentence during the story – yet a whole life has been revealed. It's as artful a piece of screencraft as Jeremy Irons's dual playing in Dead Ringers, and twice as moving.

And talking of doubled roles, Miranda Richardson is superb in the opposing roles of mother and tart. I've usually found her performances too brittle and snippy to enjoy, but here she contrasts softness and sourness to terrific effect; as Yvonne she has teeth that seem to have been grouted with black Polyfilla and a period blonde sluttishness occasionally reminiscent of her Ruth Ellis from Dance With A Stranger. Her harpy is echoed in the person of Mrs Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave), mean-spirited landlady of the halfway house to which the unfortunate Spider has been sent – "an island ruled by a tyrant queen", as a fellow inmate (John Neville) describes their situation. This grim woman, more jailer than landlady, will also be a piece in the shattered jigsaw that Spider puts together as he inches towards uncovering the terrible secret of his life.

The character of the unreliable narrator has been enjoying a high profile lately, with The Sixth Sense and The Others pulling a fast one on movie audiences all over. I'd love to see Spider win some of that following, for it is their equal in spookiness and, in the range of its acting, their superior. Sadly, it's a much harder sell as an overall package. McGrath's screenplay updates the novel's flashbacks from the Thirties to the Sixties, and though the observation is exquisite, the look of the film is terribly, terminally dismal. The smoky pub, the empty streets and the lowering gasworks are part of a deliberately oppressive texture that reflects the desolation of its central character; it's a subdued picture that production designer Andrew Sanders says he based on the paintings of Lucian Freud and Roger Mayne's black-and-white photographs of dowdy postwar London. It certainly couldn't look much bleaker.

As for Cronenberg, Spider marks a return to his best after a long string of miscues and disappointments. The horrormeister who was once preoccupied with the frailties and freakish mutations of the body has turned his gaze inward and found something even more dismaying: the prison of one man's psychopathology. It's that rare thing, a horror movie without special effects – unless one counts acting, the greatest special effect of all.