Holy Spider (2022), the third feature from Iranian writer-director Ali Abbasi, premiered at Cannes earlier this year. At the festival, Zar Amir Ebrahimi won best actress, and Holy Spider was recently tapped as Denmark’s official Oscar entry for 2023. The film, set in Mashhad, Iran in 2001, adapts the true story of a serial killer who murdered 16 female sex workers. The script, which Abbasi co-wrote, invents a female journalist named Rahimi (Ebrahimi) who comes to Mashhad to hunt down the so-called “Holy Spider” killer, who turns out to be the otherwise unassuming family man Saeed Hanaei (Mehdi Bajestani). Battling patriarchal structures and pressures not to mention the killer on the loose, Rahimi digs into Masshad’s underworld in hopes of bringing an end to Hanaei’s reign of terror.
Abbasi toys with the true crime genre’s established aesthetic strictures and touchstones. He approaches his film, embracing the grime and grit that fills out Mashhad’s back alleyways. Favoring a handheld approach reminiscent of Paul Greengrass’s work, Abbasi takes pains to lower us into the street-level world that hosts most of his narrative. This shines during the extensive nighttime sequences, where the deep red of taillights and green wash of blinking signs lends the film a macabre flair. He also repeatedly turns to tracking shots set behind his characters, lingering on shoulders and the backs of heads. The motif is both intimate and unnerving. It places the viewer just behind killer and journalist alike, making them vulnerable to our gaze. Abbasi’s stylish yet stripped-down approach foregrounds the dusty and blood-stained reality of true crime, marrying genre and aesthetic.
Abbasi and co-writer Afshin Kamran Bahrami choose to devote much of the screenplay to Hanaei’s story. More on that in a moment, but the first major impact of that framing means that Rahimi, the tale’s protagonist, spends the whole time presented like a supporting character with a meaty subplot. Ebrahimi, as the award reflects, makes a feast out of a pittance. She imbues Rahimi with a simmering intensity, the result of a driven woman forced to operate in a world where her gender constantly puts her at a disadvantage. Her character and story both feel indebted to Ted Tally’s interpretation of Clarice Starling for The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Whereas Tally and director Jonathan Demme leaned into subtext, Holy Spider comments on Rahimi’s situation with all the nuance of a jackhammer. Resultantly, it minimizes her character to an uninspired collection of platitudes and clichés.
Circling back to Hanaei, Holy Spider dedicates a great deal of runtime and energy to cross-examining the man’s psyche, mode of murder, and how his faith runs through it all. That choice curdles the film into a discouraging and, frankly, repellent example of the serial killer fetishization that bounds throughout modern popular culture. This is not a critique about examining killers or portraying their grisly actions on screen. Plenty of exceptional true crime, serial killer-focused films, such as Memories of Murder (2003) and Zodiac (2007), check both of those boxes. What Holy Spider does is, whether intentionally or not, invite empathy for Hanaei. Repeated scenes of the killer being warm with his children and wife sprinkle in amidst forays into his killings. It amounts to a layered study of his psyche that elevates understanding his fractured humanity over affording the same to women who did not murder 16 people.
Holy Spider moves away from this dismaying approach in its third act when Hanaei is found out and put on trial. As opposed to widely condemning his actions, much of Mashhad turns him into a folk hero. Variations on the idea that he was right to kill these sex workers and clean up the streets spew from his neighbors and strangers alike. That pivot adds wrinkles to the story and suggests a portion of the movie that could have better grappled with the facets of Iranian culture that Abbasi has stated he wanted to critique. Yet, it comes after two acts fixated on probing Hanae while reducing every female character to either a cardboard collection of banalities or a body simply meant to be introduced and then killed off in harrowing detail. Abbasi may have intended to condemn, but he has only succeeded in joining the morbid fetishists.
Holy Spider is currently playing in select theaters courtesy of Utopia.
Iranian writer-director Ali Abbasi's third feature, "Holy Spider" (2022), seeks to reinvent the serial killer genre but underwhelms.
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GVN Rating 5
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Devin McGrath-Conwell holds a B.A. in Film / English from Middlebury College and is currently pursuing an MFA in Screenwriting from Emerson College. His obsessions include all things horror, David Lynch, the darkest of satires, and Billy Joel. Devin’s writing has also appeared in publications such as Filmhounds Magazine, Film Cred, Horror Homeroom, and Cinema Scholars.