DAVID Cronenberg's Spider spins a macabre web. The Canadian auteur of Scanners, Videodrome and Dead Ringers notoriety has moved on from adapting William S Burrough's Naked Lunch and JG Ballard's Crash to collaborating with author Patrick McGrath, a writer no less fascinated with perversity.

They dovetail well, McGrath being attuned to Cronenberg's relish for warped perceptions and altered states of reality, with no diminution in Cronenberg's capacity to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure.

His stately, intricate Spider is visually beautiful yet austere, and as weird and elusive as ever - only David Lynch delves further into the realms of the subconscious - as the disturbed, string-spinning Spider of the title, Dennis Clegg (Ralph Fiennes), checks into a spartan halfway house for the mentally ill in London's East End.

In this study of childhood psychosis and Oedipal envy, Clegg's mind is in a halfway house of its own: a twilight zone between the deluded present (the dismal 1980s) and the past (the 1960s of his brutalised, impoverished childhood), where Miranda Richardson keeps on turning up in diverse duplicitous guises.

In a time-warping film as schizophrenic as its protagonist, Fiennes is at his withered best, his all-consuming portrayal of psychosis and sexual anxiety being the very stuff of Freud.

Updated: 09:37 Friday, January 24, 2003