(Originally reviewed May 22, 2022)
There is something very startling about Ali Abbasi’s enticingly named new feature Holy Spider, the story of an Iranian serial killer who strangles female sex workers to death in the holy city of Mashhad in order, he says, to eliminate corrupt women from society. It’s not as though Iranian cinema is a stranger to violence and bloodshed, and at least in recent years prostitution, drug abuse and soaring poverty have become common topics and backdrops in films (see Saeed Roustaee’s hard-hitting Just 6.5, among many others).
No, the jarring thing about Holy Spider is that all the characters are treated naturalistically, which can never happen in Iranian films thanks to the censorship code. Here, instead, two women who are talking indoors take off their headscarves to converse, a husband and wife have sex, a man and a hooker have sex, and people take their clothes off when necessary, just like they do in Western movies. One sassy prostitute is even vulgar. Applied to an Iranian setting, the effect is nothing short of stunning, and the courageous actors take major career risks to make this realism happen.
All this is possible because Holy Spider is a Danish-German production with multiple European co-producers and was shot in Jordan by Iranian expat Abbasi, who returns to Cannes in competition after winning the Un Certain Regard prize in 2018 for his gender-bending fable Border. The gruesome true story of the man who was nicknamed the Spider Killer because he picked up poor streetwalkers and enticed them into his lair has all the hallmarks of a classic noir, a genre hard to do right without a certain sexual tension. One curiosity is that after multiple films condemning the liberally applied death penalty in Iran, this is one that forces the viewer to desperately want the central character to be hanged.
Part of the filmmaker’s inspiration was Maziar Bahari’s 2002 documentary And Along Came a Spider, released soon after the real-life killings transpired. But the screenplay by Abbasi and Afshin Kamran Bahrami injects several important fictional elements, the most crucial being the presence of an aggressive-defensive woman journalist, Rahimi (the intense Zar Amir Ebrahimi) investigating the murders. This is not the most original storytelling device — the obstacles that appear in the path of a professional woman are easily imaginable and not very interesting to watch. Arriving alone in Mashhad (she writes for the Khorasan Times), she has to bully the hotel receptionist to give her a room. Her protective male colleague at the paper is a bit more liberal, but still worries about her going out at night on her own (fears that are fully justified by the script, of course). A good-looking police detective pretends to want to help her, only to turn out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In short, there is a lot of sexism, machismo, and downright woman-hating in Iran.
Chief among the misogynists is Saeed, a middle-aged bricklayer and family man married to the younger Fatima. Played with alert determination and maybe a touch of madness by film and theater actor Mehdi Bajestani, Saeed attends the famous holy shrine of Imam Reza, where the idea comes to him that he must rid the city of evil women. In a well-shot opening scene splashed with real fear, a tired young single mother kisses her son in bed and goes out to earn some money on the street. Her last customer is Saeed, thus revealing the killer’s identity early on.
It’s fascinating to watch the classic Jack the Ripper tale play out against the exotic if often tawdry backdrop of Mashhad, a pilgrimage city and one of the most conservative places in the country. After each killing, Saeed wraps his victim in a chador or carpet and drives off on his motorbike to the countryside to dispose of the body. Then he goes home to eat and play with the kids. It takes a veteran actor like Bajestani to convey the banality of evil at this level, and he does a superb job melding his split personality into one very normal man.
The film’s greatest innovation is left for the final scenes, when it seems that justice is going to triumph and Saeed will pay for what he’s done to these poor, desperate women. Unexpectedly there is a groundswell of sympathy for the murderer, who is viewed as a heroic clean-up man by his “supporters” including certain high-level authorities. Let us not forget that the film is set in 2001, when the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was defended by radical Jihadists as religious martyrdom. Abbasi concludes this unusual film with the unsettling thought that morbid attitudes like Saeed’s, which are condemned by most Muslims, can never be completely extirpated, but are passed on from father to son.
Director: Ali Abbasi
Screenplay: Ali Abbasi, Afshin Kamran Bahrami
Cast: Mehdi Bajestani, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Arash Ashtiani, Forouzan Jamshidnejad, Alice Rahimi, Sara Fazilat, Sina Parvaneh, Nima Akbarpour, Mesbah Taleb
Producers: Sol Bondy, Jacob Jarek
Cinematography: Nadim Carlsen
Editing: Hayedeh Safiyari, Olivia Neergaard-Holm
Production design: Lina Nordqvist
Music: Martin Dirkov
Production companies: Profile Pictures (Denmark), One Two Films (Germany) in association with Nordisk Film Production, Wild Bunch International, Film I Vast, Why Not Productions, ZDF/ARTE, ARTE France Cinema
World Sales: Wild Bunch International
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In Farsi
116 minutes
