David Cronenberg tries so hard to twist his filmic universes into pretzels of grotesquerie that watching his movies often feels like the equivalent of being castigated by a mental patient who wants you to see the world through his eyes. He pokes and prods you until you "get" it: you're not in Kansas anymore. And with his film theory-ready texts, you often feel condescended to. Sure, Videodrome raises somewhat pertinent questions about video-age voyeurism, and The Dead Zone manages to retain Stephen King's sci-fi moral sense, but you can only hear about "fear of penetration" and "the distrust of flesh" so many times before wondering what the hell all this is about, and more importantly, is it all just empty discourse?

Spider is a particularly Freudian exercise in canted spectatorship and paranoia. Though here Cronenberg tones down his penchant for exhausting trips into squishy perversity, his new film is still marked by the odd distinction of his career, the dissolving of narrative ambiguities in order to emphasize ambiguity itself. This is especially disheartening considering the splendid source material: Patrick McGrath's 1991 novel was shattering and squirm-inducing, a voyage into a warped perspective so terrified and fragmented that anecdotes were spit out in shards, and memory itself became a tangled web of self-delusion and outrage. McGrath's vulnerable, yet finally dangerously unreliable narrator heaps so many successive contradictions onto his Gothic Oedipal tale that the reader is forced to piece the puzzle together himself. Secondary characters flow in and out of consciousness, and truths and lies pile up like the bricks in an ever-growing, impenetrable wall.

In the film version, directed by Cronenberg and from a McGrath-penned adaptation, Ralph Fiennes stars as Dennis Cleg, nicknamed Spider, recently released from a mental institution, and now returning to the site of his childhood, the environment that impregnated his madness and made him into the stuttering, scribbling beanpole we now see. As he relates the sordid tale of murder and betrayal that marked his formative years, the viewers are treated not so much to flashbacks as stagings, costume dramas unfolding before ours and Spider's eyes. As in Dead Zone, Cronenberg employs the brilliant device of inviting the protagonist into his own fantasies; in that film, Christopher Walken's visions are what might be, while Spider's are what may never have been. For both characters, the moral responsibility of what to do with this knowledge eventually becomes too much to bear. The wonderful Miranda Richardson (who was as gloriously animated as a Saturday Night Live guest host as she was tragically despondent as the wife-martyr of Louis Malle's Damage) rises to the challenge of playing multiple roles, most importantly Spider's mum and Yvonne, the boozy pub tart that takes her place and grotesquely attempts to recreate her domestic pliancy after dad finishes mum off with a shovel.

Naturally we are meant to question the reliability of a narrator who recounts events he never physically witnessed. But Cronenberg's theoretic film devices so severely underline this spectatorial doubt, that there is little room for the audience speculation that should drive the narrative. The issues of self-reflexivity and doubling that rise to the film's surface are all well and fine, but they ultimately diminish the emotional returns. Having one actress appear as Yvonne, only to then be replaced in a later shot by Miranda Richardson doesn't retain the ambiguity of subjective experience and the unreliability of memory so much as it simply dictates that the perspective is warped, allowing the viewer a safe surety in being doubtful of Spider, rather than leaving us truly confused and adrift-it's a move that crystallizes rather than fragments. Pretty counterproductive in a film so obsessed with fragmentation. It doesn't help that after just a half-hour Cronenberg reveals to us in close-up the contents of Spider's diary, a series of lunatic chicken-scratches and scribbles. It's as if Kubrick had uncovered Jack Torrance's "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" tapestry from the outset; the tension (not only narrative, but between sanity and madness) dissolves.

Thankfully, Cronenberg's exemplary pacing proves respectful enough of McGrath's tender, intestinal narrative; the whole plot trajectory feels like a birth. Or perhaps a rebirth, into an uncannily familiar, distrustful new world. The superb opening shot tracks a slew of passengers as they spill onto the platform from an arriving train. The camera leisurely follows each and every unknown face until Dennis "Spider" Cleg emerges last, spewed out into the disorienting new cityscape. It's a wonderfully desolate opening, and coming so soon after the beguiling credit montage of Rorschach-like splotches of torn wallpaper, it promises a soulful, chilly character study that unfortunately never arrives.

The notion of entering one's past, or a subconscious dream-state representation of the past, has been a convention since Dickens's A Christmas Carol, in which the spiritual reassessment of a personal history unbound the future. In McGrath's tale, the sorting out of past events serves more as a false psychotherapy, or the key that doesn't unlock the truth, but relocks it behind an even stronger deadbolt of self-delusion. In the book, we're left without knowledge of what really happened, and the tragedy is of never quite knowing, of being left, along with Spider, on the precipice between fact and fiction, life and death. On film, Spider's unreliability is explicated, so the remaining journey back to the womb simply trudges through its series of impressionistic tableaux to the inexorable conclusion, seeming at once long-winded and abrupt. Fittingly, the memory of it fades.
- MICHAEL KORESKY