Zar Amir Ebrahimi is the star of Holy Spider
(Picture: BFI/London Film Festival)Holy Spider is the second film in three years about Iranian serial killer Saeed Hanaei, a builder and dad-of-three who preyed on sex workers in Mashhad in 2000 and 2001.
A documentary in 2020 called Killer Spider also covered the so-called ‘Spider Killer’ (the name given to the murderer by the Iranian press).
While Holy Spider’s overall message about the dangers of Iran’s inherent misogyny could not be more topical given the Middle Eastern country’s ongoing protests, the film lacks the gut-punch viewers might expect from such harrowing subject matter.
The movie, which screened as part of the London Film Festival on Saturday night, starts with Hanaei (Mehdi Bajestani) picking up a sex worker on the Mashhad streets and bringing her to his home, where he strangles her before dumping her body on the city’s outskirts. This is the Spider Killer’s modus operandi.
Zar Amir Ebrahimi plays (fictional) investigative journalist Rahimi, who must navigate the country’s web of sexism while also hunting down the killer and questioning why authorities aren’t doing more to catch him.
Ebrahimi, who won Best Actress at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is understated but brilliant as the stubborn and determined Rahimi, her eye-rolling belying a lifetime of challenges about her decision to travel alone and unmarried, and questions about an alleged scandal earlier in her career.
The actress herself had to endure Iran’s wrath after a sex tape was leaked in 2006 (when she starred in an Iranian soap). Ebrahimi always denied she was the woman in the footage and no formal charges were ever filed against her - but her Iranian career was over (one politician had called for her to be stoned to death).
Director Ali Abbasi shows us Hanaei as a supposed ‘family man’, spending time with his children, his wife and his in-laws. His secret night-time travails are his own personal vendetta against ‘corrupt’ women. But Abbasi wants to show that Hanaei is not an anomaly in Iranian society, but rather a naturally-occuring symptom of a combination of repression and religion.
At a time when the depiction of violence against women is under increasing scrutiny, Abbasi shoves the reality in the audience’s face. But his decision, which some may label gratuitous, does have a pay-off in the film’s denouement.
Rahimi is convinced of a wider conspiracy, involving the police or even politicians; we see her prying into the upper echelons of Mashhad’s police and religious officials. The city is home to Imam Reza shrine, often dubbed the heart of Shia Iran; there’s a general feeling that this killer is ‘cleaning up the streets’.
The murders are shown dispassionately, with a sort of odd, uncomfortable humour (especially in one killing, where Saeed can’t settle upon his preferred murder weapon). But the film sticks to the tropes of the serial killer genre a bit too rigidly, meaning it’s so busy showing the ‘how’ that it doesn’t have sufficient opportunity to dig into the ‘why’.
There is a killer, there is a chase, there is a confrontation, there is not anything too remarkable in the film itself, outside of that central performance by Ebrahimi
Iran reacted with fury to the film, which was a co-production between Sweden, Denmark, France, and Germany. Initial attempts to film in the country were abandoned and instead Holy Spider was shot in Jordan and Turkey in 2020.
In May, Iran’s culture ministry condemened the Cannes festival for awarding Ebrahimi Best Actress and said it was “an insulting and politically-motivated move” before comparing Holy Spider to The Satanic Verses, accusing it of “insulting the beliefs of millions of Muslims and the huge Shiite population of the world”.
Holy Spider may have set pulses racing in Iran due to its subject matter but it fails to get the audience’s pulse racing, despite some strong work in front of the camera.
