The fable of the scorpion and the frog, narrated with a Caribbean lilt by a captive British soldier, serves as both the thematic cornerstone and the hermeneutic key to the entire architecture of "Criss Cross". This is no mere anecdote, no exotic interlude in the rural grey of Northern Ireland; it is the film’s genetic code, its poetic manifesto. "It's in my nature," hisses the metaphorical scorpion. And nature, in this 1992 masterpiece from Neil Jordan, is an ineluctable force, a labyrinth of distorting mirrors in which national, sexual, and personal identities shatter and reassemble into unforeseen and destabilizing forms. The film itself is a scorpion: it ferries us across a river of genre conventions—the political thriller, the hostage drama—only to sting us treacherously midstream, revealing its true, bewildering nature.

The first part of the work is a masterful essay in narrative misdirection. Jordan constructs a tense, almost conventional thriller, steeped in the mud and fog of the Northern Irish conflict. We have the IRA soldiers, among them our protagonist Fergus (an immense, sorrowful Stephen Rea), his cold and fanatical comrade Jude (a Miranda Richardson who exudes danger like a venomous reptile), and the prisoner, Jody (a Forest Whitaker of infectious vitality). But beneath the surface of the genre mechanics, Jordan is already sowing the seeds of subversion. The relationship that develops between captor and captive transcends the Hegelian master-slave dialectic. It becomes a forced intimacy, a Socratic dialogue on life, love, cricket, and human nature. Jody is no passive victim; he is a narrator, a seducer, a catalyst who, with his overflowing humanity, cracks Fergus’s ideological certainties. He entrusts him with a task, a final wish that is at once a curse and a promise of redemption: to find his beloved, Dil, in London.

And here the film undergoes its first, radical metamorphosis. With Jody’s death, the work abandons the tones of the political thriller to plunge into the smoke and neon lights of a metropolitan noir, steeped in a desperate melodrama that would have delighted a Douglas Sirk or a Fassbinder. London is not the promised land, but another kind of prison, a labyrinth of solitude where Fergus, now under an assumed name, tries to atone for a guilt he cannot define. The search for Dil becomes an obsession, an attempt to give meaning to a senseless sacrifice. His meeting with her, in a pub with a colourful clientele, is the film's true beating heart. Dil (played by a Jaye Davidson whose magnetic, almost otherworldly androgyny was a stroke of casting genius) is a creature of pure surface: heavy makeup, garish clothes, a fragility concealed by an aggressive brazenness. Fergus falls in love with her, or perhaps he falls in love with the ghost of Jody he sees in her, or perhaps even with the idea of keeping a promise, the only solid thing in a liquid world.

Then, the scorpion’s sting. The Reveal. The one that, at the time, made audiences around the world gasp and which Miramax, in one of the most astute and controversial marketing campaigns in history, begged critics and viewers not to spoil. Today, that element has entered popular culture, but to analyze it merely as a "plot twist" would be a colossal error, a trivialization that would betray its profundity. The point is not what is revealed, but how that revelation acts as a detonator, unhinging every certainty of the protagonist and, by extension, the viewer. It is a semiotic earthquake that forces a rereading of every gesture, every word, every glance exchanged up to that moment. Fergus's initial reaction is the visceral, violent one of a man whose heteronormative masculinity has been thrown into check. But it is here that the film ascends to the sublime. Having overcome the shock, Fergus does not flee. He stays. His humanity, his capacity for empathy—the very thing Jody had sensed in him back in that Irish shack—triumphs over prejudice. The love he feels for Dil is not nullified by the discovery, but transfigured into something more complex, more pure: a form of devotion, of protection that transcends the binary categories of gender and sexuality.

Jordan orchestrates an operation of alchemical transmutation that recalls, in some ways, the cinema of Almodóvar, but stripped of all camp exuberance and steeped in a twilight melancholy that is distinctly British. If the Spanish director celebrates fluid identity with carnivalesque joy, Jordan explores it with an almost tragic gravitas. The criss cross of the title isn't just the espionage between the IRA and the British government. It is the double game of identity that every character is forced to play: Fergus is a terrorist with the soul of a saint, Jody a soldier with the sensitivity of a poet, Jude a woman who has sacrificed her femininity on the altar of ideology, and Dil a woman who inhabits a man’s body. They all wear a mask, all play a part imposed by "nature" or by circumstance.

The film is woven through with literary and cinematic parallels. Fergus, a new Orpheus descended into a metropolitan Underworld to save the shadow of a lost love, moves through a landscape that has the contours of a Graham Greene novel, where guilt, faith, and redemption clash in an eternal chess match. The reappearance of Jude, transformed into a ruthless femme fatale with a platinum blonde bob and an automatic pistol, drags the film into the most classic territories of noir, evoking the dark ladies of Out of the Past or The Killers. She is the personification of the scorpion’s ineluctable nature: the ideology that cannot help but sting, destroying any human bond not functional to the Cause.

Placed in its historical context, "Criss Cross" was an act of intellectual courage. Released at a time when the Troubles were still an open, bleeding wound, the film refused to offer a Manichaean political reading. There are no heroes or villains, only human beings trapped in an inherited spiral of violence. The IRA is neither glorified nor demonized, but shown as a microcosm of individuals with different motivations and degrees of humanity. Jordan's choice is not political, but humanistic: to use the conflict as an extreme laboratory in which to study how identity, love, and loyalty can survive—or succumb—under intolerable pressure.

The ending, with Fergus in prison receiving a visit from Dil, is of a wrenching, bittersweet perfection. By telling her the story of the scorpion and the frog, Fergus finally accepts his nature, not as a terrorist or a lover, but as a man capable of a gesture of absolute, sacrificial love. He has crossed the river, he has been stung, but he has brought the person he was meant to protect to safety. In that final, melancholy scene, "Criss Cross" comes full circle, revealing itself not as a thriller, not as a love story, not as a film about the Irish conflict or gender identity, but as all of these things at once. A polyphonic and unclassifiable work, a profound and moving meditation on the ineluctable prison of our own nature, and on the rare, precious possibility of transcending it through an act of empathy.