On April 8, 2002, Saeed Hanaei was executed for the murders of 16 women between 2000 and 2001 in the Iranian city of Mashhad. The media dubbed him the “Spider Killer” for the way he lured his victims into his lair — the same apartment he shared with his unsuspecting wife and children, though like any good family man turned moonlighting murderer, he made sure they were out of the way before getting his hands dirty. In his confession, Hanaei said he had specifically targeted sex workers as part of a God-given mission to cleanse Mashhad, often thought of as Iran’s spiritual capital, of sin and vice. One of the story’s more repugnant developments was just how many people — from friends and family members to journalists and religious leaders — agreed with and even applauded his actions.
That’s meant to be the chilling upshot of “Holy Spider,” a capably acted, resourcefully made and ultimately self-defeating thriller about Hanaei’s crimes and the widespread culture of misogyny from which they sprang. It’s the latest from Iranian-born, Denmark-based director Ali Abbasi after his Oscar-nominated 2018 feature, “Border,” a genre-blurring mashup of beastie prosthetics, weird sex and anti-xenophobic politics. After that wildly imaginative horror-fantasy, few likely expected Abbasi to pivot to true crime, though a signature whiff of transgression remains. The mere notion of a movie about an Iranian serial killer might sound shockingly incongruous, at least for those whose notions of the country’s cinema begin and end with critically lionized auteurs like Jafar Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami.
Here it may be worth noting that “Holy Spider” is a Danish-German-Swedish-French co-production and was shot entirely in Jordan. Filming in Iran was out of the question, given the extremity of the movie’s content — a graphic early sex act, followed by equally graphic violence — and the admirable bluntness of its politics. Abbasi’s script, which he wrote with Afshin Kamran Bahrami, diagnoses Hanaei’s horrific deeds as just an unusually concentrated variant of a much more pervasive societal malaise. To that end, the writers tell this grimly multitasking story through the eyes of two leads: the killer, here renamed Saeed Azimi (Mehdi Bajestani), and a fictional investigative reporter, Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi), who has come to Mashhad to track him down.
