There’s a moment early in Holy Spider, Ali Abbasi’s new murder suspense film, where a news report about 9/11 plays on a television while a man has sex with a prostitute in the next room. It’s a jarring moment, especially since all we’ve seen up until that point is a young woman (Alice Rahimi) roaming the Iranian city of Masshad, selling her body for whatever money she can scrounge together to support her son as well as a drug dependency. The falling of the World Trade Center is just background noise for her – she has more immediate domestic troubles that take precedent over American tragedies. The news doesn’t seem to have any effect on her Johns either, who all treat her with some form of mental and physical abuse. It’s also the last night of her life, as the last man she sees strangles her to death, another murder at the hands of the Spider Killer.

This prologue at the beginning of the film sets the table for what’s to come: you will find yourself disturbed and engrossed in equal measure, you will also be privy to unconscionable violence brought on by a society that uses moral certainty to excuse extreme misogyny. Abbasi wrote the script with Afshin Kamran Bahrami, and based it on the true story of Saeed Hanaei, a serial killer in Masshad who pledged to cleanse the streets of corruption and vice. Singling out prostitutes, Hanaei killed sixteen women between 2000 and 2001, leaving a city wrapped in fear while also winning kudos from conservative pockets who admired his convictions. Abbasi fictionalizes parts of Hanaei’s story, but the central conceit is true: in the holy city of Masshad, the paths are available for any man to dispatch with as many women as he pleases.

Saeed is played by Mehdi Bajestani, whose performance is a measured portrayal of self-loathing fighting against self-righteousness. Bajestani’s unnerving portrait of a war veteran driven homicidal by his own perceptions of masculinity and religious piety fluctuates between monstrous and pathetic. His level of self-aggrandizement is his ultimate downfall, but Bajestani plays him as totally naive, with full faith that he works on the whim of his God and the people at large. On the other side, Zar Amir Ebrahimi plays Arezoo Rahimi, a journalist who returns to her hometown of Masshad to report on the Spider killer who, at this time, is still at large. Rahimi has little patience for the antiquated traditions of Masshad society, her very female-ness meeting resistance from police, witnesses, and even the front desk of her hotel who nearly refuse to give a room to an unmarried woman.

Rahimi is a completely fictionalized character – Abbisi’s Clarice Starling, if you will – that allows Holy Spider not only a much-needed separation from the severity of Saeed’s murders, but also a more granular perspective on the day-to-day sexism that permeates society at large. Ebrahimi won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her performance, and there is something very impressive about what she achieves. Rahimi is the film’s most didactic character, her history and behavior are all tied tightly to the movie’s themes in ways that can at times make her indiscernible from a bullhorn for exposition, but Ebrahimi’s interpretation is riveting, illuminating her barely tempered rage and obsessive commitment to justice for the murdered women. You get the sense that Abbasi views Rahimi as a stand-in for the outrage that women at the time were unable to express.

There’s a bluntness to certain aspects of Holy Spider, particularly in the murder scenes involving Saeed, which possesses a dose of exhilarating sadism that can feel at odds with its anti-violence message. At times, the movie might seem more interested in making you mad than truly understanding what you should actually be mad about. Abbasi is a very competent filmmaker and Spider is at its best when it mimics the classic gritty thrillers of the past, and passes it through its singular lens. The performances from Ebrahimi and Bajestani create a wondrous cat-and-mouse game, and depending on the situation, it’s not always clear which is the cat and which is the mouse. Holy Spider isn’t ambiguous about its moral center which is a strength at times, and not so much at others, but this is a captivating study of a monster formed by a culture dominated by dogma and dismissive of nuance and empathy. A story that is relevant far beyond the holy city of Masshad.

 

Directed by Ali Abbasi