Direction: Ali Abbasi
Country: Iran
Holy Spider, Ali Abbasi’s third feature film, didn’t have the desired impact in me because of its narrative process. The director, who teamed up with Afshin Kamran Bahrami in the script, based himself in the real serial murder case that led Saeed Hanaei, an ultra-religious bricklayer and ex-war vet, to kill 16 women between 2000 and 2001 in the holy Iranian city of Mashhad. Abbasi, who marveled many cinephiles in 2018 with Border, deliberately deviated from the facts in an attempt to give misogyny a broader sense. He shot the film in Jordan.
The relatively unknown Iranian-French actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi plays the journalist who would be key in the capture of Saeed, impersonated without brilliancy by Mehdi Bajestani. Even when resisting thrills, this rote serial-killer thriller work minimally, but Holy Spider is too programmatic and a bit academic in its effort to denounce Iran’s religious fanaticism and discrimination against women. Methodically paced, the film keeps you squirming in your seat, but then the characters feel a bit superficial and the homicidal rampage seldom surprising.
Nadim Carlsen’s artfully unsoiled cinematography adds an air of suffocating rectitude in a sick machismo manifesto that, alternating strong and fragile sections, piles up crime scenarios with intermittent tension. The coldness of the director’s gaze ends up freezing our blood. This is aggravated by the fact that we know upfront who the killer is. The semi-fictional account could have benefited from darker atmospheres, while the legacy of blood and murder left by the proud killer is somewhat turned lighter by the end. Holy Spider doesn’t add up to a fully realized thriller.
