Spider

When mentally fragile Dennis “Spider” Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) moves from a sanitarium to a London halfway house, he brings along tortured memories—and fantasies—of his childhood and his working-class parents (Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson). Director David Cronenberg, working with a script by Patrick McGrath (from McGrath’s own novel), moves around inside Spider’s head and rummages through the closets and drawers of his memory until it’s as hard for us to sort out the real and the imaginary as it is for Spider himself. Cronenberg nurtures an aura of dreadful fascination; we’re not sure we want to go where he’s taking us, but we can’t look away. When at last Cronenberg lets us escape from Spider’s tortured mind, it’s a relief and a mercy; we feel as if we’ve gotten out just in the nick of time.