David Cronenberg’s “Spider,” based on the novel by Patrick McGrath, is quiet and sad, yet… David Cronenberg’s “Spider,” based on the novel by Patrick McGrath, is quiet and sad, yet still manages to be pretty incendiary.

The title character, played with messy nuance by Ralph Fiennes, has just been released from an asylum, though his schizophrenia may be not quite in check.

He lands in a dingy halfway house run by the haggard Mrs. Wilkinson (Lynn Redgrave) and immediately starts remembering a childhood that may or may not have been real, which he chronicles in scrawls that aren’t really a language. In his memories, several women take on the face of his real mother (Miranda Richardson), whom he believes his father (Gabriel Byrne) murdered and replaced with a nasty “tart.” When the ending gives us a measure of definitive information, it’s not all that sensational or surprising, but it’s still affecting.

Fiennes is fully on-board, carrying the film – oddly enough – while saying almost nothing, and director Cronenberg is still messing with our minds pretty hard even when it seems he’s taking a break.

Opens Friday at the Harris Theater.