VIFF 2021 REVIEW | "The Girl and the Spider": a Compelling, Frustrating Puzzle Box
6/12 ForReel Score | 2.5/5 Stars
Our living quarters naturally come to be extensions of our own cluttered minds. When we are forced to uproot ourselves from our abodes—move out of our homes and into unknown futures, put a defiant stamp on a chapter of our lives—the mind can reel in unexpectedly dramatic, if subtle, ways. Lisa (Liliane Amuat) in The Girl and the Spider is moving; moving out of her flat and moving on from the life she built with her flat mates, but it could be that those in her network—her family members, close friends, casual acquaintances, and flatmates both future and past—are the ones who will feel most jostled about, displaced, and “moved” by her undertaking.
The sophomore effort from Swiss director Ramon Zürcher—now assisted in the directing department by his twin brother, Silvan Zurcher (who only served as producer on his debut, The Strange Little Cat)—The Girl and the Spider is a disquieting and abstract little staging of the mercurial dynamics of individuals united by the most household of routines.
To be fair, though, how “routine” can we really consider moving? We’ve all been involved in relocating another human being—maybe some of us more than others—but any of us can attest to how disruptive a day of hauling boxes and reassembling furniture can be. These days are disruptive because they make us break from our routines, and because, more often than not, they signify the end of a phase of our lives.
Lisa’s move means an end to living with Mara (a saturnine Henriette Confurius). The two seem amicable and agreeable towards the decision, but there is quite clearly more going on beneath the surface. The move is jarring and rearranging more than just belongings. All the while, those helping and those saying goodbye to Lisa as a neighbour dip into and pull out of frame, each hauling with them their own enigmatic conundrums.
While I am not familiar with the Zürcher brothers’ previous effort, their latest feels completely sui generis. The film employs a curiously rhythmic method of editing, despite the sparse music accompaniment, and it elevates its sound design and editing to the nth degree—often above dialogue. The dialogue that does come often comes in the form of non-sequiturs, and it is reactive more towards the trivial in a character’s immediate environment, as opposed to a character’s larger dramas or emotions. The Girl and the Spider is a film that feels maddeningly opaque, even though it offers an intimate view behind the walls at daily life.
Another way the Zürcher brothers keep you at an arm’s length is through their framing. Aside from a few close-ups of a hodgepodge of maybe-symbolic objects, the brothers and cinematographer Alexander Haßkerl favour static medium shots that are almost always themselves framed by the doorways and walls of Lisa’s new apartment. While this technique gives The Girl and the Spider a sort of architecture feel in its construction, it also never really lets you get your bearings on space. Never does an establishing shot give you a sense of what exists in each room; never does a dolly shot help you feel that move from one room to another. A floor plan of Lisa’s new flat is presented to us as the film opens, but the film continues almost as if it is trying to do everything in its power to turn that floor plan into a cubist abstraction. The Zürcher brothers work as if they’ve made a revisionist reading of Ozu’s playbook, adhering to but also contorting the Japanese auteur’s boxed-in compositions.
Unlike in the works of Ozu, The Girl and the Spider sees characters pass into and out of frame constantly, and thus do their stories criss-cross and overlap. This gives the film an almost origami quality, its cinematography emphasizing the “squareness” of the frame, its layers of narrative folding over themselves and transforming.
The Zürcher brothers have an impressive level of control over their craft, but the downside to their nebulous method of storytelling is a film that is difficult to find base in, difficult to penetrate; for as often as I was intrigued by the events depicted on screen, I was equally as put-off and soured by the film’s obstinate insistence on ciphers and diversions. Is Astrid, Lisa’s mother, attempting to seduce the handyman? Does Mara have a history with Jan (Flurin Giger)? Is Mara trying to sabotage this whole move in some way? Is any of this potent? Or is everyone just behaving off-kilter because this filmic universe simply demands that they do so?
Mara sits at the centre of the whole tale, and while she does emit a certain hypnotic quality in how she is unpredictable and impudent—how she is like Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks (she even jams a pencil into a Styrofoam cup like Audrey)—she also behaves too aloof for her scheming to ever feel pointed or substantive. The Girl and the Spider is often just her acting out, causing quiet chaos and antagonizing animals. It could be assumed that her acting out is her reaction to the change in her environment, her losing her friend, to a certain extent, but what this film suggests beyond that and to where it progresses is all but mystified.
It may be one’s hope that resituating and changing homes, even if done out of plain necessity or desperation, will lead you to greater understandings and a better self. The characters in The Girl and the Spider may have this on their minds, but they are too stymied by their curious orbits and too insistently oddball to break from this film’s particular mould. The mould is a compelling one, and one that is admirably calculated, granted, but also one that can be read as pretentious and abstruse. It comes off as alienating. An odd choice, considering the story, because when we’re undergoing a change of living space and looking for assistance, don’t we want to try to appeal to as many people as we can?
