Spider seems to have been made in a style that director David Cronenberg has been working towards his entire career: Every image is essential to the narrative development or emotional impact, while every image is somehow strange, unfamiliar. Like all of the Canadian filmmaker's best work (Crash, Naked Lunch), but only more so, each detail is presented with such gravity that everything seems to operate on the level of allegory, even though the allegory itself remains obscure and perhaps non-existent.

Simply put, I've only seen Spider once, and I'm not sure if I'm qualified to write about it yet. So if this column doesn't express much in the way of an opinion, consider it a sign of respect for a work in front of which I don't want to appear dumb.

I know this much is true: At the beginning of the film, Dennis Cleg––nicknamed Spider by his mother when he was a boy––moves into half-way house after having spent years in an insane asylum. Suspiciously, the house is located in the same working-class London neighborhood in which Spider grew up and, as the film gradually reveals, suffered a terrible trauma involving the death of at least one of his parents. After 20 minutes or so depicting Spider's uneasy adjustment to the worn-down half-way house, the film begins to present his dysfunctional childhood is presented in disjointed flashbacks. These scenes serve the function that clues satisfy in more conventional mysteries, revealing the key moments in the hero's youth that led to his mind's unraveling.

Most Cronenberg films can be described as a journey down some new rabbit hole. Spider is a more difficult work because here the journey exists entirely within a human mind.

The adult Spider walks through all of his own flashbacks, murmuring to himself––thereby reinforcing how wholly subjective the story is. One could make the case that many of the non-flashback scenes exist within the character's head as well, based on the implausible recurrence of certain "past" images in the film's "present." In several scenes, for instance, Spider sits in a meadow that seems straight out of outmoded calendar art; a passing detail in the film later proves that the image does come from an old calendar. And then there is the half-way house, which looks like it was bombed during an air raid in World War II and never repaired.

It is entirely to Cronenberg's credit that even the sets of Spider contribute to the overall psychological portrait. The baffling combination of war-period architecture and contemporary costuming creates the impression that the movie takes place in an alternate universe made out of spare parts from ours. In this regard, the Cronenberg movie that this most closely resembles Naked Lunch, which seemed to construct not a truthful reproduction of 1950s America, but the 1950s America that only William Burroughs' perceived.

The film's sound design is also effective. Cronenberg makes excellent use of surround sound, which is Reason Number One to see the film in a theater. Leaps forward or backward in time are sometimes signaled by the sudden shift of sound effects from one set of speakers to another. As a result, Cronenberg divides the theater into the quadrants of Spider's psyche, often to startling effect.

For all the emphasis––and for all the information that must be conveyed in its fairly brief running time––it is surprising, then, how little dialogue is in Spider. I imagine that this will present a problem for many viewers, although there is enough stunning imagery here for the film to resonate strongly as art before it "works" as storytelling.

Fortunately, the cast never calls attention to the potential challenges of the script. Like Gus Van Sant's recent Gerry, Spider often seems predicated on finding a cinematic context for the aesthetic of Samuel Beckett's plays (which Cronenberg and screenwriter Patrick McGrath cite as an influence), and like Van Sant, Cronenberg uses his stars as icons as much as actors. Ralph Finnes rises to the challenge of the title role, even if almost none of his dialogue is comprehensible and his character is difficult to access emotionally.

As Spider's parents, Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson are even more impressive, since they have to alter their emotional states to match the inexplicable whims of the narrative while always appearing to play the same characters. In other words, the film frequently hinges on their performances to convey a sense of continuity when it does not always exist.

As far as tricks with continuity go, Cronenberg plays a doozy of one with Richardson. Without revealing too much, let me say that the actress appears in multiple roles, all very different from another, that perhaps reveal the same truth about Spider. I'm not sure what Cronenberg is getting at with this move, yet like many of the innovations in Spider, it seems indisputably realized, endowed with the inevitability I ascribe to classic cinema. Perhaps only time will tell what Spider has to say to us, but after only a single viewing, I might be convinced that it's worth the patience.