The handful of other reviewers that had the - ahem - honor of seeing "The Water Spider" refer to it as a brilliantly obscure piece of forgotten gothic horror. I might be wrong, of course, but could it perhaps be they are overpraising the film because it's so incredibly rare and difficult to track down? Because, honestly, all I saw was a senseless, dull, incoherent and incredibly cheap "thing" I wouldn't even label as a film. In a godforsaken peasant village, a talentless writer tries to escape from his nagging wife by walking next to the banks of a small river and play with a specific species of spiders. He takes a little arachnid home and hides it in the attic, where the little critter inexplicably transforms into a massive & hairy spider at first, and then subsequently in a beautiful babe with long black hair. How? Why? For what purpose? Your guesses are as good as mine. At first, I assumed the girl only existed in the guy's mind, but apparently his wife and even the villagers see her as well. Lack of logic and explanations aside, "The Water Spider" is still intolerably slow and boring. Whenever you hope something interesting might happen, the sequence abruptly ends and turns back to something dull, like Bertrand behind his writing desk or footage of the wife calling out to her husband one-hundred million times.
Review of L'araignée d'eau
