Is murdering prostitutes in modern-day Iran the work of God? It is if you are the madman and religious fanatic carrying out a reign of serial-killer terror in the gripping and horrifying “Holy Spider” in the early 21-century city of Mashhad, the second most populous city in Iran and the location of the shrine of Imam Reza.
Director Ali Abbasi, co-writing with Afshin Kamran Bahrami, was inspired by the actual murders, which occurred while he was a student in Iran and by a 2002 documentary about the killer by Iranian-Canadian journalist Marziar Bahari. Abbasi, whose debut film was a Copenhagen-shot horror film named “Shelly” (2016), says his focus shifted from the serial killer to a fictional female journalist trying to find out why the police have been so ineffective in catching the killer.
Abbasi’s new protagonist made it capable to focus on culturally sanctioned misogyny in Iran. For this reason, Abbasi shot “Holy Spider” in Jordan. The film is not a whodunit. We know who’s doing it from the start. He is a devout father, husband and family man named Saeed (Mehdi Bajestani), a hulking builder with mitt-sized hands. His method is to pick up prostitutes at the same park on his motorcycle, drive them to his home when his wife Fatima (Forouzan Jamshidnejad) and their kids are staying with her parents. Saeed strangles the women, most of them mothers and junkies, to death in gruesome close-up scenes and dumps the bodies on the outskirts of town.
