Spider (Ralph Fiennes) is a strange and fragile character having experienced such a traumatic childhood, which resulted in spending a long time in a mental institution, he returns to the streets of the East End of London where he grew up. The sights, sounds and the smells of those streets begin to awaken the deeply buried memories of his childhood. At the centre of these memories is the great trauma of losing his mother (Miranda Richardson). Spider believes that his father, Bill Cleg (Gabriel Byrne) murdered her so that he could move a prostitute into the house in her place. As Spider claws through the falsehoods he has woven around himself, he finally begins to arrive at the truth of his life and his mother's death ... The truth, which will take him to the very limits of his faltering sanity.