Lrb/London Reviewed: Spider (2002) With Peter Suschitzky

Introducing Spider, and discussing it afterwards with regular host Gareth Evans, will be its award-winning cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, who shot 11 of Cronenberg’s films, including Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Crash - and Cosmopolis, which is showing here on 17 November, to mark Don DeLillo’s 90th birthday.The latest season of LRB Screen at the Garden Cinema, which has explored visions of London created by non-British filmmakers, concludes with David Cronenberg’s Spider.

The first of two films made in the city by Cronenberg, it was adapted to chilling effect by Patrick McGrath from his own 1990 novel of the same name.‘Spider’, born Dennis Cleg (in a riveting performance by Ralph Fiennes) returns from a psychiatric hospital to a halfway house in the East End, not far from where he grew up - the site of a long-buried but catastrophic trauma.

Lodging under the surveillant eye of landlady Mrs.

Wilkinson (Miranda Richardson), he paces the abandoned canals and towpaths that retain his childhood memories, slowly realising what happened all those years ago...Filmed across East, South-East, and North London in pre-gentrified locations, from the domestic to the post-industrial, Spider is genuinely haunting, an unsettling portrait of a psyche in freefall, where the borders between place and personality start to break down.

Despite its premiere at Cannes, and critical acclaim, Spider - not screened here for many years - is one of Cronenberg’s least familiar titles, due in part to its very limited original release.

Peter Travers wrote in Rolling Stone that ‘what catches us in Spider‘s web ... is the director’s sympathy with this freak man-child who struggles to order his confused memories into a kind of truth.

That’s what makes Cronenberg a world-class provocateur: his movie gets under your skin.’