Critics at the Cahiers du Cinema would brandish their baguettes like battle-axes.

Writers for the venerable French cine-magazine are largely credited with formulating the auteur theory in the 1950s, which holds, among other things, that it is great directors who make great films. So, if Toronto’s David Cronenberg, a recent recipient of France’s National Order of the Arts and Letters, is up for best direction, then Spider should likewise be up for best motion picture.

But it’s not, since, as we know, award shows are rarely so consistent.

Spider represents a departure for Cronenberg, whose reputation as the Master of the Macabre has been cemented by the gruesome images conjured up in his fertile, twisted imagination. Exploding heads in Scanners; James Woods having a cassette inserted into his stomach – and pulling a gun out – in Videodrome; a villain impaling his head on a massive pair of scissors in The Dead Zone; the mutant gynecological instruments in Dead Ringers… You get the picture. While there is a murder in Spider, the gore quotient is relatively low.

As is the dialogue quotient. Main character Dennis ‘Spider’ Clegg (Ralph Fiennes) is a scarred, demented outpatient from a mental institution in 1980s London. The young man, hunched over and clad in a weathered raincoat like a modern-day Nosferatu, is so damaged that he can hardly articulate a coherent sentence. Fiennes pretty well mumbles his way through the entire film, and the fact that he is still able to convey a wide range of emotions speaks volumes of not only his performance but also Cronenberg’s direction.

Spider, a Canada/U.K. copro, shot for three weeks in London and five weeks in Toronto in summer 2001. It boasts a stellar British cast that includes Fiennes, Miranda Richardson as three key women in Spider’s life, Gabriel Byrne as his father, Lynn Redgrave as the keeper of the halfway house where the adult Spider settles in, and John Neville (The Eleventh Hour) as a housemate.

Devoid of the sensationalism and physical effects that have marked Cronenberg’s previous work, Spider represents his most subtle piece of helmsmanship.

‘I was talking to Gabriel Byrne about it and he said, ‘This movie is built on the kind of details that are just thrown away on other movies,” Cronenberg said on the set of Spider. ‘It’s all physical, small details – how the cigarette is rolled, how things are done with hands. It’s small nuances of movement and posture. It’s the accumulation of all that.’

These details carry the tale of Spider revisiting the events in his childhood that led to his incarceration. The framework for these flashbacks, which has the adult Spider passing by old haunts and seeing past events unfold inside, was devised by Patrick McGrath, who is nominated for best adapted screenplay, working from his own novel.

Executives from Sony Pictures Classics who saw the film at Cannes expressed some reservations.

‘They loved the film,’ Cronenberg recalls. ‘They were a little worried. It was the usual thing. One guy loved it; the other guy said, ‘We love it, too, but we’re worried about how to market it.’ And then they saw the reviews and were there for the main screening and saw the response and realized that people do get it.’

(The concerns of Sony, which did pick up U.S. rights at the fest, were hardly surprising. After all, it was rival Warner Bros. that changed the ‘philosopher’ in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to ‘sorcerer’s’ for fear of confusing American audiences.)

Spider had a triumphant homecoming, taking the Toronto-City Award for Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto International Film Festival. It is being distributed domestically by Odeon Films, which opened the film for a two-week run, sans publicity, at Edmonton’s Westmall 8 cinema in order to qualify for Genie consideration. Odeon, like Sony, is planning a major release early in the new year.

Spider’s six Genie nominations are rounded out by nods for art direction/production design, costume design (for Denise Cronenberg, the director’s sister and collaborator since The Fly), overall sound and sound editing.

Cronenberg has won nine Genie Awards in the past, including achievement in direction for Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch and Crash. He has received six additional noms.

-www.spiderthemovie.com