Spider (Ralph Fiennes) is in a constant struggle to overcome a traumatic event early in his life. He has been allowed a second chance at life after a long stay in a mental institution and returns to the streets where he grew up; sent to a halfway house under the stern but unsupervised watch of Mrs. Wilkenson (Lynn Redgrave). The sights, sounds and smells of revisiting the familiar streets of his old neighborhood send Spider further down a shadowy path that reawakens memories of his where his mother (Miranda Richardson) and his father (Gabriel Byrne) raised him. He soon begins to uncover the real truth shifting seamlessly back and forth between the tragic events that polarized a boy's adolescence to the shell of a man enduring the surreal plausible reality of today.