Spider by David Cronenberg

First we had The Fly, now it’s Spider... at this rate, we should probably start bracing ourselves for Ladybug 😁

Cronenberg's latest feels a bit Kafkaesque... visually, it's stunning. I can already see the Oscar buzz for Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Richardson... though honestly, I don't think Fiennes deserves it as much as M. Richardson does (even if the Academy has a thing for those kinds of roles)...

The whole plot is deeply Freudian. Ralph Fiennes plays a schizophrenic dealing with intense Oedipus complex issues... after spending 30 years in an institution, he’s finally back out in the world... much like the old man in Bergman's Wild Strawberries. In Spider, he revisits his past and watches himself as a ten-year-old, seeing his mother as both a saint and a sinner, all while harboring a deep hatred for his father (played by Gabriel Byrne)...
Fiennes... he just slumps through the dark streets of the East End... spinning webs, muttering, babbling, and smelling foul 😁 coughing, talking to himself, rolling tobacco with filthy fingers, hating his father, hating his mother... just a truly miserable soul 🙄

All in all, it's a beautiful film 🙂)))

Man, this sounds absolutely incredible. Honestly, I’d pretty much given up hope on Cronenberg altogether... 🙂

So, what's actually got you losing faith in Cronenberg? 😕

driftingowl27 said:Man, this sounds incredible. I honestly thought I’d lost my faith in Cronenberg for good... 🙂

rabbit:

So, what exactly made you lose faith in Cronenberg?

Alright, let's go... FIGHT 🙏 😁

here’s why I lost faith in Cronenberg. correction. my reasons for losing faith in case I ever actually had any in David... he used to have good movies, but after eXistenZ, that guy just completely tanked for me. honestly, Crash still sits pretty high on my list of absolute worst cinematic experiences.
seriously though, there's gotta be some story or weird reason why you insist on spelling Fiennes with a "ph"... so quit gatekeeping and let us in on it. 🙂

Jeff told me 😁

It's just a professional habit, I guess 🙄

btw, I actually think Crash is a great movie

Here’s my breakdown of why I’ve officially lost faith in Cronenberg...
The guy used to be such a powerhouse. He was churning out these incredibly original, genuinely entertaining (in their own weird, charming way🙂 ) flicks like Shivers, Scanners—which is easily my favorite—Videodrome, and Dead Ringers. But then? He just started stumbling through absolute nonsense. Like, I mean, props to him for having the guts to even try making something as nonsensical as Gollum (I mean, seriously, what was he thinking with that script?) or that total disaster of an M. Butterfly. And don't even get me started on that "utopian" joke called eXistenZ.
Look, Crash and The Fly are fine, I guess, but they aren't anything special. 🙂

I don't really see a massive departure from > or > in terms of what Cronenberg is actually doing. It’s just that the subjects he was tackling back then naturally led to those visually and thematically jarring moments that just stick in your brain—you know, the stuff that becomes part of our collective pop culture memory. But looking at his later work, there's this consistent drift away from the "normal"... though, I guess, what even is normal? This shift toward the grotesque that > leans into touches different layers of reality, but they all share this common thread: the messy intersection of evolution, technology, and death. And, of course, much like how > approaches things (just in a different context), you get that classic question of what reality actually is and how we can trust anything presented to us as real. In a way, > connects to those broader themes, though for the hardcore fans, it might feel like a slight detour from what we usually expect from him. There are moments where it hits like pure horror—but specifically that internal kind of horror, filtered through the protagonist, where you start noticing the small details of his illness and psychological instability (anyone remember >?). It’s one of those films where, at a certain point, you can practically feel the dread crawling under your skin. Truly an exceptional piece of work.

Gerald Barrett25 said:I don't really see how Cronenberg made such a massive leap away from stuff like "Shivers" or "Dead Ringers."

Honestly, I think Elvis Presley summed up his whole situation perfectly with this line:

"You started taking yourself way too seriously
And trying to trap the audience with cheap melodrama..."

The way David pushes things toward the edge of pure grotesque happens across different layers of reality, but it always boils down to that messy intersection of evolution, tech, and death.

plus sex and disease.

I'm not even going to touch what slyrider16 said just yet; let him figure out a basic timeline first if he wants to be useful.

driftingowl27, M. Butterfly is honestly one of the most disturbing movies I've ever sat through—and I mean disturbed on a deep, unsettling level. That scene in the cramped quarters where the con artist strips in front of their terrified lover really stuck with me.

I think eXistenZ is great, so I don't really get what you think is missing from it.

Crash is solid. You ever read the book?

Honestly, I’ve got a bit of a bone to pick with Cronenberg. As he’s gotten older, it feels like he’s totally lost his sense of humor. Don't get me wrong—his movies were never meant to be comedies, far from it—but he used to have this subtle, razor-thin thread of black comedy running through everything.
For me, that was always the perfect counterweight to his clinical, almost surgical approach to the subject matter.

As for M. Butterfly, if you ask me, the movie has this massive plot hole. It’s not just that Cronenberg fails to explain how someone could go twenty years without realizing they're dealing with a man instead of a woman; it's much more important than that—he fails to pivot the story in a direction where that revelation actually matters.

Then there's eXistenZ, which I found a bit too full of itself in its attempt to peddle this ultra-depressing vision of the future. Again, the premise has such great potential for a light, dark comedic detachment (I mean, for God's sake, it's about a video game...), but Cronenberg leans so hard into the "weird/cool" factor that it starts to feel like unintentional parody.

I haven't read the Crash book yet—is it actually worth the time?

bunny,

What were you even thinking when you said I should work on the chronology? Is this because I phrased my sentence mentioning Existenz before Crash, even though they were actually made in reverse order? What's the big deal... I really hope you aren't implying someone can't talk about a movie unless they've sat through every single thing that director ever made.

Mickey!

I was debating whether to even bring up that bizarre detail—the fact that he doesn't "notice" he's dealing with a man. I figured someone else would eventually call it out, so I’m just adding my two cents, but honestly, that’s the most fascinating part of the whole movie. Just think about how much mental energy he had to burn just to deny it to himself. Even if he wasn't consciously aware of it, how much strain was that putting on him? It makes their entire sexual dynamic feel so incredibly weird.

Very disturbing! And that tension isn't some flaw in the film; it's actually one of its strongest points, maybe even the most powerful thing about it.

Personally, I think the book Crash is great.

bunny!

Interesting take, but honestly? I feel like that kind of "suspension of disbelief" only really works if you're reading the book (which I haven't actually read, for the record). In a movie, you could've probably just made it irrelevant—like, pivot the whole focus to something else entirely. As it stands, it just didn't click for me.

It’d be a mistake to write it off as irrelevant when it’s actually, in its own way, the most important part of the whole thing!

jg (watched yesterday) - Devil's Backbone; rating 2 (out of 5)

David Cronenberg, or as he’s widely known, "The King of Body horror," is easily one of the most compelling directors working today. Watching his films always triggers this incredibly conflicted cocktail of emotions—one minute you’re recoiling in pure disgust, and the next, you’re staring at the screen in absolute awe... and more often than not, his work sparks these massive, heated debates. You have the small-town moralists throwing around accusations of pornography when they watch "Crash," while the self-proclaimed "intellectuals" turn around and attack him for his depiction of women being too passive.
My personal favorite has to be "Dead Ringers"; even though people have already picked it apart with those tired, worn-out psychoanalytic theories, it remains one of the most fascinating visual explorations of psychological conflict ever put to film (only rivaled by Hitchcock's "Vertigo"). It captures that brutal friction between a cold, calculating "scientific mind" and those raw, aggressive sexual impulses.
As for "eXistenZ," that was actually the weakest of his films I've seen so far. The concept itself is brilliant, but the execution felt diluted—which, if he’s being honest, happened because the producers stepped in and altered the vision since nobody would touch the original script. 🙂 I suspect that might be why his recent work feels a bit "softened"... I mean, does anyone actually come knocking at his door anymore? He isn't quite commercial enough to satisfy the mainstream horror or sci-fi crowds, yet he's just "artistic" enough to alienate the big-budget studios looking for something more traditional. 🙂

Alright, my vote goes to Cronenberg. 🙂

I’ve seen Crash and Dead Ringers.
"Gynecological tools for mutant women." Now that's something!

My memory is a bit fuzzy on Elephant Man—the black and white one. Was that also Cronenberg?

Let's get a screening organized 👋

P. S. I am Fly—I never actually saw it. When I was a kid, I read a couple of pages from an article in a magazine along with some photos, and it gave me nightmares for ages.😲

I can't quite wrap my head around the memory of 'Elephant Man', the black and white one. Was that also directed by Cronenberg?

David Lynch

Honestly, I’ve never been a huge fan of Cronenberg. It’s not that I have a weak stomach or anything, it’s just not really my thing. Fly is such a classic, though—it’s like when people get obsessed with those old retro video games, you know? Even if it drags on a bit, that scene with the bug spray was absolutely legendary. As for Crash, I haven't even seen it; I doubt any of these others 🙄
would be much better.

I haven't even seen Crash, so I can't really say if these others would be my thing either.

No offense intended, but... why don't people just let artists evolve in whatever direction they want? Cinema should be experienced individually. Let the statisticians worry about the trends.