Holy Spider
Ali Abbasi’s tense crime thriller about a real-life serial killer makes a critical statement about Iranian society.
This extremely well-made film reaches us flying under false colours, but it does so proudly for it is not intended to deceive. On the face of it, this is simply a film about a serial killer based on real-life crimes committed in the Iranian city of Mashhad in 2000 and 2001. The chosen method of the murderer, whose name was Saeed Hanaei, was strangulation and over these two years he killed some sixteen women, mainly prostitutes. Holy Spider is a fictionalised account of how this man (Mehdi Bajestani) was tracked down by a crusading woman journalist, Rahimi, (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi), but the portrayal of the man dubbed the Spider Killer is factual when it comes to the nature of his crimes and their motivation. Saeed Hanaei (or Saeed Azami as he is renamed here) was a married man with a wife (Forouzan Jamshidnejad), a teenage son (Mesbah Taleb) and two younger daughters. Setting out to kill prostitutes, he wished to be thought of as somebody undertaking a jihad against vice.
The director and co-writer of Holy Spider is the Iranian Ali Abbasi who is based in Denmark. In making a film about Hanaei he was following a feature documentary (2002’s Along Came a Spider) and a dramatised movie entitled Killer Spider made in the same year. However, these titles have not been released in the UK. In any case, it would seem to be a fair assumption that they had different aims from those of Abbasi. I say that because the purpose of Holy Spider is to use Hanaei’s story to illustrate Iran's attitude to women, a fact that makes it very timely given the recent death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. There is, of course, no suggestion that Hanaei’s behaviour was in any sense typical, but we are shown how Rahimi suffers from the country’s attitudes to women: she is treated with disapproval for being a lone female traveller (the hotel where she has made a reservation initially claims to be full and that it has no room for her), is subjected to unwanted attentions by the police captain in charge of the case (Sina Parvaneh) and has to rely for support on a sympathetic local reporter (Arash Ashtiani). Furthermore, and far more significantly, Abbasi suggests that the police failure to identify Saeed as the killer stemmed from indifference to the fate of women who were prostitutes. He indicates too that many Iranians regarded the murderer as someone to be approved for cleaning up the city. The last third of the film covers events following the arrest of Saeed and stresses the degree of support that existed for this brutal killer.
Given this intent, it is hardly surprising that Abbasi was unable to shoot the film in Iran (those who know the country have confirmed that Amman in Jordan stands in most convincingly). Nor is it unexpected that Holy Spider has raised the ire of the Iranian government and that threats have been issued against those involved in the film. The chief strength of this uniformly well-acted work lies less in the story itself than in the wider implications that I have outlined. As a study of a serial killer being tracked down, Holy Spider tells a not unfamiliar tale and, as such, while it is a very good example of its kind, it is hardly the stuff of which masterpieces are made. The film’s social and political concerns do indeed add weight but, even then, it should be acknowledged that the narrative does contain some elements which carry a certain fictional charge. They include the way in which Saeed is eventually trapped after the film’s imaginary heroine, Rahimi, offers herself as bait and the extra drama later on when the situation takes unexpected turns in the manner of a thriller that trades on plot twists. While these elements can to some extent be seen as limitations, they never prevent Holy Spider from being a very effective drama which simultaneously expresses very genuine concerns about life in Iran today and about the situation of women in particular.
Two criticisms that have been made about this film in certain quarters call for comment. Until now Abbasi's reputation has largely rested on his strikingly offbeat second feature, 2018’s Border. Some have regretted that by comparison Holy Spider is a more conventional work, but, given that it is so successfully done, I see no reason for that to count as a valid criticism. More important is the need to counter the view that Holy Spider is a misogynistic work. One certainly understands concerns over the many thrillers that emphasise crimes against women since there are such works which seem to take actual pleasure in depicting that. Here, however, we have a film which is very sympathetic to women, a fact illustrated by the way in which Abbasi gives us such a strong central character in Rahimi. No less significantly, he is at pains to show the victims in human terms as women struggling to get by. For that matter, while the film finds the actions of Saeed appalling, the screenplay is at pains to show him not as a monster in the manner of Hannibal Lecter but as a deeply flawed man who may have been shaped by war-time experiences in the Iran-Iraq war. That for so much of the time he appears so normal makes him a figure all the more disturbing. Abbasi seeks in his film to express fully his horror over Saeed’s actions and does so by emphasising the suffering he imposed on his victims but one death scene in particular may be detailed beyond what was strictly necessary. That could indeed be a misjudgment but it is not evidence of misogyny and, while at times Holy Spider makes for uncomfortable viewing, that is exactly what it was intended to be and for good reason. Those who will find it too hard to face should, of course, avoid seeing the film, but nothing here invalidates a work which, while offering a gripping narrative, simultaneously throws out a challenge to the Iranian authorities to reconsider their attitudes to women, attitudes which all too obviously continue to prevail.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Mehdi Bajestani, Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, Arash Ashtiani, Forouzan Jamshidnejad, Mesbah Taleb, Firouz Agheli, Sina Parvaneh, Ariane Naziri, Alice Rahimi, Nima Akbarpour, Maryam Taleb, Sara Fazilat.
Dir Ali Abbasi, Pro Ali Abbasi, Sol Bondy and Jacob Jarek, Screenplay Ali Abbasi and Afshin Kamran Bahrami, Ph Nadim Carlsen, Pro Des Lina Nordqvist, Ed Olivia Neergaard-Holm, Music Martin Dirkov, Costumes Hanadi Khurma.
Profile Pictures/ONE TWO Films/Nordisk Film Production/Wild Bunch International/Why Not Productions/ Film i Väst/Arte France Cinéma-Mubi.
118 mins. Denmark/Germany/Sweden/France. 2022. US Rel: 28 October 2022. UK Rel: 20 January 2023. Cert. 18.
