Spider (film) - Plot

Plot

Spider is the story of Dennis Cleg, a man who is given a room in a halfway house catering to mentally disturbed persons. Cleg has just been released from a mental institution and in his new abode starts piecing together or recreating in his memory an apparently fateful childhood event. He roams the nearby derelict urban area and the local canal and starts to relive or visualize a period of his childhood in 1950s London with his mother and his father. A shift takes place in the child's psyche when he witnesses his mother groping with his father in the garden and, subsequently, when he sees his mother in a silky night gown she wore for his father. The son, as a grown man seems to recreate in his memory the build up to his father's murder of his mother with the passive support of his mistress who then moves into the house and is presented as his mother. The young son then kills the mistress by gassing her in the kitchen. After that memory he attempts late one night to kill the landlady whom he sees alternatively as the mistress and his mother, but backs away after she says, "What have you done Mr. Cleg?" He is taken back to the asylum.