Review of The Spider's Stratagem

For the most part, "The Spider's Stratagem" plays almost like a parody of the biases that some people have against "art films", by confirming most of their fears: it's infuriatingly slow, rambling (someone please tell that "culinary tester" to shut up!), diffuse, confusing (OK, everyone comments on how identical the protagonist looks to his father so it makes sense for one actor to play both roles, but many other actors play the same characters both in the present and over 30 years ago, with no attempt from the make-up department to de-age them), and weird for the sake of being weird (that lion head probably symbolizes something....but I don't know what it is). And yet, if you stick with this film, which is not the easiest thing to do, an interesting and thought-provoking theme emerges near the end: the chasm that separates reality from legend. The way the story turns out gets you wondering how many times things like that have happened in real life; we will probably never know, that's the whole point. ** out of 4.