Spider

A new thriller by Canadian film maker David Cronenberg, focusing on the strange person of Spider, a man who has spent almost two decades of his life in an insane asylum. He then returns to London to the district where he was born to be admitted to a post-treatment psychiatric center. It was in this city that, before he was 12, he experienced the trauma of a lifetime - an experience that led him to madness: his mother was killed by his father, a fireman who spent his nights drinking in a pub and who consorted with a prostitute, Yvonne. Practically isolated from the world, expressing himself by grunting, writing ceaselessly on small blocks of paper, Spider decides to carry out an investigation on the tragedy that befell him. He runs away from the hospital and returns to the places fraught with memories of the past. This quest for the truth is also to be a quest as to himself, for his deeper identity. On the border, Spider can discover that there is something worse than losing his mind: to find it once more, but in shreds. “This film is a plunge into the deeper meanders of the human spirit”, says Cronenberg.

Born in 1943, in Toronto, the son of a journalist and of a piano teacher, even as a child, he showed a strong inclination to literature and music (he played classical music on the guitar up to the age of 12). In his first films, such as in the short film Transfer (1966) and the medium-length films Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970), the qualities could be noted that are his, even today: convincing argument, originality in the script, renewal in terms of terror, and humanization of the characters in spite of or, at times, because of their bizarre nature. His first feature, Shivers (1975), a modernized film about vampires, made him a “master in horror films”. He was acknowledged internationally in 1981 with Scanners. He also directed Videodrome (1982), The Fly (1986), Naked Lunch (1991), Crash (1996), and eXistenZ (1999).

43ª MOSTRA INTERNACIONAL DE CINEMA

43ª MOSTRA INTERNACIONAL DE CINEMA