The Girl and the Spider

As her roommate Lisa prepares to move out of their apartment, Mara contemplates the end of an era. Furniture is moved, walls painted, cupboards built. Amid all the hustle and bustle, secret longings and desires come to the surface and coalesce around the roommates as well as around Lisa’s mother Astrid, the movers, the girls’ old neighbors, the neighbors’ cat, Lisa’s new neighbor and an ever-expanding cast of characters. Day turns into night and one final party in the apartment. When the last box is moved, the fragments of their lives remain.

The Zürcher brothers compose a poetic panopticon of forms of human relationships that is at once a study of everyday life, a fairytale and a psychological portrait of a brittle world. Following The Strange Little Cat, The Girl and the Spider is the second installment in a trilogy about human togetherness, a ballad about the need for closeness and the pain of separation.

Winner - Best Director, Encounters, Berlinale
Winner - FIPRESCI Prize, Berlinale

"Thrilling, thrilling cinema. Order and chaos fighting it out at the level of form and content." -Erika Balsom, The Film Comment Podcast

“Wondrous.” -The New York Times

“A symphony of separation and solitude.” -Allan Hunter, Screen
International
“Deliciously ambiguous…[The] Zürchers’ movies are like prisms, capturing the things people do when they think no one’s watching…and when they desperately wish they were.” -Variety

“Terribly exciting.” -Rogerebert.com