There are two things that are very difficult to properly portray on film: drug abuse and mental illness. Interestingly enough, they are both subject to the same issues and pratfalls. How can you convey an abnormal way of thinking without actually being able to have those thought processes in your own mind? Without the context of a bad trip or a schizophrenic episode, the screenwriter and director are usually left to oversaturating the scenes with psychedelic visuals and monstrous audio. David Cronenberg throws these conventions out the window for Spider, giving us enough familiar portrayals of mental illness to help us along without spoonfeeding us MTV-generation visual ideals.

We're introduced to Spider Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) at the end of a long traveling shot of a train. He has finally made the big step of moving into a halfway house after years of living in a mental institution. He's given a small, moldering room to live in, and is watched over by Mrs. Ilkenson (Lynn Redgrave). Slowly, Spider begins piecing together his past through journal entries written in his own strange alphabet and being an objective observer in flashbacks to his childhood. Spider remembers his loving mother (Miranda Richardson, in one of THREE roles in the film) and his somewhat distant father, Bill (Gabriel Byrne) His father has an affair with the local bar whore, Yvonne (also played by Richardson) and murders Spider's mother with a shovel after she discovers him in the arms of Yvonne. Yvonne then tries to become Spider's surrogate mother, taking the place of Mrs. Cleg, while Spider's father denies any knowledge of the murder. As Spider, both young and old, hatch plans to uncover the truth, we are questioning the reality of his memories. Are these true memories or delusions? If they are both, where does the fantasy end and the reality begin? When we discover the truth, we wonder if this twist is truly valid, or another delusion.

I'm not going to lie here: This movie is VERY difficult to digest. With Spider's frequent visits to the same locations in both the present and in his flashbacks, it becomes hard to distinguish between his present life and his memories. Spider himself barely speaks, his adult counterpart mumbling in a thick cockney accent that one strains to hear. Miranda Richardson's triple roles give the movie an extra wrinkle of insanity, with two doppelgangers of his mother confusing Spider even more than he already is. With such a twisting web of craziness, it's refreshing to have the look of the movie be so consistently bleak, with little consistent details. Spider's fingers are stained leathery from smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, his slice of modern London is flithy and mildewy, whereas his past is comparatively clean-scrubbed and warm. Cronenberg is a fantastic director, and he proves it again with this movie. Ralph Fiennes conveys Spider as an introvert, his movements small and subtle, always fearful. Gabriel Byrne is wonderful as well, showing Bill Cleg as a man confused by love and lust, and his son's deterioration. Best of all is Miranda Richardson, who is alternately sweet as Spider's mother and vampish as Yvonne. She conveys the duality wonderfully, and truly makes Spider's memories all the more strange.

The movie itself looks phenomenal, with blacks being perfectly saturated, and the earthy tones of Spider being appropriately cold and damp. While not a movie with vibrant colors, the near-monochromatic feel is captured perfectly. Audio is a crystal-clear Dolby 5.1 mix, with the only sore spot being Spider's unintelligible mumblings. However, that isn't the fault of the soundtrack, but rather the actor. While I'm aware the point was to make Spider himself difficult to understand, it became almost ridiculous. Extras are decent, with a commentary track, 3 featurettes, actor and director filmographies, and a handful of trailers for Spider and other Sony films.

I was floored by this movie. It took the mental illness aspect and made it believable and accessible without resorting to shock tactics or overwhelming imagery. While it was difficult to comprehend, that made its vision all the more valid. Spider's schizophrenia made it so nothing was cut-and-dried. If he isn't given the luxury of true comprehension, why should we? We are given that fleeting peek into how his mind works, and that is enough to accept the insanity of the film, and appreciate what it's trying to do.