Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider recounts the murder spree of Saeed Hanaei (Mehdi Bajestani), a.k.a. the Spider Killer, who murdered 16 female sex workers in the holy city of Mashhad, Iran, between 2000 and 2001. Driven by a quest to cleanse his surroundings of moral corruption, the thirtysomething construction worker prowls the streets for victims, who he then brings back to his home and promptly strangles. It’s an m.o. that the film details in coldly brutal fashion in its opening sequence, with the camera lingering almost fetishistically on the face of one of Saeed’s victims as the life is agonizingly drained from her body. By the time the film cuts to its title card, laid over a spooky nighttime aerial shot of the city and accompanied by an ominously droning music score, Abbasi has fully primed us for the horrors to come.
Like a lot of true crime inspired entertainment, Holy Spider certainly runs the risk of callous exploitation, particularly as Abbasi reshapes aspects of the Spider Killer case’s history to attempt a larger evaluation of how humanity is crushed under the weight of a misogynistic theocratic state. Chiefly, he constructs a fictional protagonist, female journalist Rashimi (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi), whose progressive ideologies stand in stark contrast to Iran’s rigid moral codes. Arriving from Tehran to report on the as-yet-unsolved murders, the progressively minded Rahimi is first turned away from her hotel reservation on account of not being accompanied by a man and then chastised by the concierge for not wearing her hijab properly.
Misogyny impedes Rahimi’s investigation every step of the way throughout Holy Spider. Local authorities adopt a laissez-faire attitude toward the Spider Killer and they elude Rahimi’s questions while regarding her with condescension and scorn. She’s frequently called a “slut” due to a past incident of reporting a former boss for sexual harassment; in one alarming scene, Rahimi is threatened and almost assaulted by the Mashhad police chief after rejecting his advances. While blunt, these scenes never feel removed from reality and effectively illustrate the pervasive attitude that allows gender-based violence to thrive anywhere.
Rahimi’s investigation runs parallel to the activities of Saeed, who we glimpse by day as an outwardly normal yet evidently unstable family man (he’s prone to sudden headaches and fits of rage). A cat-and-mouse dynamic gradually emerges between the two when Rahimi realizes that she’ll have to take matters into her own hands to uncover the killer’s identity. Already playing fast and loose with the facts, Holy Spider then plunges full bore into an imagined revenge fantasy that eagerly indulges in more than a few silly genre contrivances along the way.
That the film still manages to sustain interest through this stretch, however, is a testament to Amir-Ebrahimi and Bajestani’s intensely verisimilar performances. Additionally, Abbasi balances the script’s more artificial narrative turns with a naturalistic sense of the environment and of the vulnerable citizens who populate it, both the women forced into sex work out of necessity and the conflicted families who shoulder the consequences. Throughout, Holy Spider trickily manages to bridge the gap between social realism and exploitation cinema in a way that hints at how both are rooted in a similar place of gritty authenticity.
This frenzied approach reaches a full boil when Rahimi poses as a sex worker in order to catch the Spider Killer. As Saeed picks her up on his motorbike—and on her first night out, no less—and then promptly loses the tail that Rahimi’s journalist colleague Sharifi (Arash Ashtiani) maintains on them, the far-fetched series of events begin to feel ripped from any number of flimsy Hollywood thrillers. But where the resulting nail-biting confrontation and Saeed’s subsequent arrest would serve as the climax in a more conventional film, with one woman triumphantly saving the day through her plucky ingenuity, they instead serve as the jumping-off point for a third act that brings the film’s core thesis into sharp focus.
Witnessing the ensuing press conference where the police crow about finally catching Saeed, Rashimi grimly states to Sharifi, “It’s not over.” With Kafkaesque absurdity, Abbasi then presents the growing public support for Saeed’s crimes, as well as the authorities’ not-so-subtle admiration for his ostensibly righteous quest. On the other hand, despite being directly responsible for Saeed’s apprehension, nothing changes for Rashimi, who still finds herself shut out of press coverage while the higher powers gladhand a criminal behind closed doors.
Most disturbing of all are the film’s final moments, which land on the realization that Saeed himself is no longer necessary to keep his depraved ideas alive in the public consciousness. The film provocatively concludes on raw footage of a post-arrest interview that Rashimi conducts with Saeed’s teenage son, Ali (Mesbah Taleb), in which he boasts about his father’s crimes and enthusiastically play acts their methods using his young sister as a stand-in. While contentious in its approach, Holy Spider compellingly positions misogyny as an unending inherited nightmare, stretching far beyond the actions of one single man.
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