The Girl and the Spider Movie Storyline. The time has finally come: Lisa is moving into her first apartment on her own. For years she has lived in a flat share with Mara and Markus, her move now means the end of an era. While Lisa is looking forward to the change, for Mara it triggers a roller coaster of emotions.
The day before moving day, boxes are being packed, clothes sorted and the first pieces of furniture go into Lisa’s new apartment. Lisa’s mother ASTRID is there to help too. Amid all the hustle and bustle, longings, secret desires and tensions come to the surface. As is the case with Lisa and her mother, who flirts with the removal man JUREK. A strange dynamic also emerges between Jurek’s helper JAN and Mara. And then, KAREN, the new neighbour turns up. Lisa gets on with her straight away, but Mara is jealous of her.
In the evening, Lisa organizes a leaving-do at her old apartment. Jan comes by too, but instead of getting closer to Mara, he ends up in bed with the neighbour KERSTIN, whose strange flatmate NORA is an eerie bystander throughout the night.
After a feverish night, Lisa’s moving day is upon them. Astrid again, lends them a hand, even though her strife with her daughter becomes increasingly tense. Meanwhile, Jan becomes a pawn in a merry-go-round of desire, in which MS. ARNOLD, who once kidnapped the neighbour’s cat, and a young pharmaceutical assistant to whom Mara feels strangely attracted also make an appearance. And then there’s also the mysterious chambermaid who years ago, used to live in Lisa’s old room and is said to have taken off on a cruise ship. Surrounded by change, Mara’s desire for connection emerges ever more strongly, turning the room into a whirring body of longing.
The Girl and the Spider (German: Das Mädchen und die Spinne) is a Swiss drama film, directed by Ramon Zürcher and Silvan Zürcher and released in 2021. The film centres on Mara (Henriette Confurius) and Lisa (Liliane Amuat), two women who have been living together, and portrays the emotional complications as Lisa moves out to a new apartment. The cast also includes Ursina Lardi, Flurin Giger, André Hennicke, Ivan Georgiev, Dagna Litzenberger-Vinet, Lea Draeger, Sabine Timoteo and Birte Schnöink.
The film premiered in the Encounters program at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival, where the Zürchers won the award for Best Director in the program alongside Denis Côté for Social Hygiene (Hygiène sociale). It is slated to have its North American premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.
Film Review for The Girl and the Spider
Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s second film is a thrilling roundelay of mystery and sexual intrigue set off by a young woman’s move into a new apartment.
The much-anticipated follow-up to their masterful feature debut, The Strange Little Cat (TIFF Wavelengths 2013), Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s The Girl and the Spider is every bit as precise and thrilling. An uncanny, expanded chamber piece thrumming with life, in all of its conflicting impulses and ambiguities, the film takes place between two Berlin apartments as Lisa (Liliane Amuat) prepares to leave her roommate Mara (Henriette Confurius) for a place of her own.
The move — a material and emotional fissure that ripples out into each attendant complex and street, introducing a constellation of neighbours, lovers, strangers, and pets alongside Lisa’s mother and the hired movers — triggers repressed resentments and latent longings between the young women, who engage in a Lubitschian roundelay of words, gestures, and small-scale cruelties amidst the buzzing activity of packing, disassembling, and reinstalling.
Fuelled by a magnetic sense of entropy — with constant caesuras, breakages, spillage, and injuries, both intentional and accidental — The Girl and the Spider is extremely sophisticated in its formal play of choreography and primary-coloured compositions. As characters collide in space, they seem increasingly beholden to an unseen web of sexual intrigue and interactions that shift between duelling and desirous. Employing edits as ruptures, the film explores intersubjectivity by way of physical proximity, mesmeric anecdotal detours, poetic abstraction, and moments of comedic surrealism, all set to a music-like ambient soundscape.
Incisively exploring the rarely considered relationship that exists between roommates, the Zürchers brilliantly exhume the charged energy of seemingly platonic shared spaces, in which passive aggression accumulates over time alongside a heightened intimacy and dependence.
The Girl and the Spider (2022)
Directed by: Ramon Zürcher, Silvan Zürcher
Starring: Henriette Confurius, Liliane Amuat, Ursina Lardi, Flurin Giger, André M. Hennicke, Ivan Georgiev, Dagna Litzenberger Vinet, Lea Draeger, Sabine Timoteo, Birte Schnöink
Screenplay by: Ramon Zürcher, Silvan Zürcher
Production Design by: Sabina Winkler, Mortimer Chen
Cinematography by: Alexander Haßkerl
Film Editing by: Ramon Zürcher, Katharina Bhend
Makeup Department: Simone Enkerli
Music by: Philipp Moll
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: The Cinema Guild (United States)
Release Date: November 24, 2021 (United States), July 8, 2021 (Berlinale)
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