Holy Spider (2022) - Blood on the hands of Iran's Islamic system and its leaders

♥♥♥♥♥♥

 

A woman with pronounced makeup lures from the inside of a Persian-style carpet on this poster for Ali Abbasi's Holy Spider

An Islamic fundamentalist serial killer is at large in the Iranian city Marshhad in 2000-01, and a female journalist travels there to investigate the matter and probe the police's lack of progress in the case.

 

Holy Spider is written by Afshin Kamran Bahrami, 'story supervisor' Jonas Wagner and great Iranian-Danish filmmaker, co-writer/co-producer/director Ali Abbasi (Shelley (2016)). It is based on the actual case of Saeed Hanaei, who killed 16 prostitutes in Marshhad.

It is a horrific watch and may well make you feel physically unwell at its conclusion, as it should be, but it is also an illuminating, captivating, important and angry film, a film incensed at the misogynistic constraints of repression, abuse and ongoing blood sacrifice that is the shadow side of Iran's Islamist regime, still very much jarring and painful to observe today, as scores of people, including teenagers, are murdered by the state to uphold a fundamentalist system of Islamic repression where women are second-grade citizens and culture and freedom of expression are largely banned.

Not often do we come to ponder the cruel, dangerous and unpleasant life as a street prostitute in a country such as Iran, but in this very well-produced film we do. Martin Dirkov's (Enforcement/Shorta (2020)) sparse, eerie score heightens the feeling of urban dissolution and palpable danger.

The film is no traditional thriller, no whodunit, no procedural, and also not a film that wallows in gory excesses. It also doesn't shrink away from the horrific acts of murder and the chilling disposal of the bodies. Mehdi Bajestani (Whisper (2018, TV-series)) is incredibly convincing as the religious nut murderer. The context of Iran however seems to remove some of the guilt from the man's shoulders: Of course there is a prostitute slayer in Iran, one comes to think, and I'm sure there have been others since him also. In a country so centered on eradication of anything impure to Islamic standards, it isn't really all that strange as an occurrence. 

The same line of thought haunts the protagonist, the female journalist sublimely portrayed by Zar Amir-Ebrahimi (Morgen Sind Wir Frei (2019)) as a very brave, intelligent and yet inevitably victimized individual, who tries to fight the overwhelmingly patriarchal, male chauvinist  system. Forouzan Jamshidnejad (Mitra (2021)) is powerful as Saeed's wife, and Mesbah Taleb is heart-breaking as their oldest child, 14 year-old Ali, who is pushed towards embracing and embellishing his father's murders by the people around him. 

This spider's web is only half-way spun by the homicidal spider himself. The other part is constructed by the society around him. In the words of Abbasi, it is described as Iran's serial killer society.

That regrettably still stands. And Holy Spider is a very powerful call out for its downfall.

 

Related post:

 

Ali Abbasi: Border/Gräns (2018) - The second Lindqvist adaptation is another wtf-experience with muddled implications if any 

Watch a trailer for the film here

 

Cost: Estimated 2.5 mil. $

Box office: 1.37 mil. $

= Huge flop

[Holy Spider premiered 22 May (Cannes Film Festival, main competition) and runs 117 minutes. 21 companies and support bodies collaborated in the financing and production of the film. The shooting was impossible in Iran and also, it turned out, in Turkey. Shooting eventually took place from May-June 2021 in Jordan. The film has so far only 2 recorded markets at Box Office Mojo: France with 635k $ and Hungary with 2k $. The film has furthermore so far sold 23k tickets in Denmark, coming to around 360k $. The film has primarily screened at film festivals so far, but is set to release in Netherlands, Canada, Turkey, Germany and Sweden in coming months. It has already been chosen as Denmark's entry to the 2023 Oscars. The film won the Best Actress award at Cannes. Iran's regime has indirectly threatened the filmmakers and cast by calling the film 'insulting' and comparing it the Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses (1988). Abbasi returns with The Last of Us (2023, TV-series) and does not have his theatrical return announced yet. Bajestani does not have his next gig announced yet; Amir-Ebrahumi returned in Les Survivants (2022). Holy Spider is fresh at 86 % with a 7.50/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Holy Spider?