Ramon Zürcher's hypnotic drama The Girl and the Spider playfully bends the rules of moviemaking to create a memorably unsettling experience.
The Girl and the Spider is a brilliantly maddening thing, a drama that plays by its own perplexing rules. Unfolding across a couple of small Berlin apartments over a couple of days, it takes a perfectly ordinary scenario — two roommates going their separate ways — and abstracts it into a kind of emotional guessing game, eliding numerous niceties of exposition, character development, and even standard storytelling protocol.
A focus on the vagaries of cohabitation is just one clue that we’re back in the hands of the Swiss-born, German-trained writer-director Ramon Zürcher. Another is the offbeat rhythm and offhand mischief he brings to cramped domestic spaces.
At times, the film seems to linger in the doorway of slamming-doors farce without quite entering. There’s certainly a hint of screwball to Zürcher’s remarkable blocking — the way he turns the twin apartments into parallel hubs of hustle and bustle, movers and painters crisscrossing the frame, creating alternating currents of foreground and background activity. Numerous half-developed subplots similarly hint at an unrealized potential for a droll sex comedy.
The movie’s cloud of half-articulated emotions often grows dark with hostility. Mara seems the aggressor at first, the toxic roomie of the pair — pounding the wall of Lisa’s new bathroom in sudden spite, cruelly dumping a cup of scalding coffee on someone’s pet pooch. Later, she kills a fly as punctuation on a particularly withering insult. But Lisa has a mean streak, too. “It’s strange, I’ve never felt like you’re my mother,” she tells her mother, unprovoked.
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