Motovun Film Festival 2022: ‘Holy Spider’ (Review)

Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider is a tense thriller centered on a female journalist traveling to the Iranian holy city of Mashhad to hunt a serial killer.

The Spider Murders are some of Ali Abbasi’s final memories of Iran before he moved to study filmmaking in Scandinavia. It makes sense that he would come back to pick at the story eventually. In his second feature Holy Spider, he creates a tense thriller loosely based on the real life serial killer who murdered 16 sex workers at the turn of the 21st century in Iran.

With Holy Spider, Abbasi tries to show the two conflicting sides of his native country – the driven and open-minded as opposed to the radical traditionalists. For one of his leads he imagines Rahimi (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi) – an investigative journalist who travels to Mashhad to report on the stagnating case in an attempt to propel the authorities into action. The other story line is focused on Saeed and the contrast between his murderous urges and his family life.

By splitting the film into two narratives it is Saeed’s victims that suffer most. They remain nothing but footnotes in a larger detective story. Barely one of his victims is infused with some character and even then only for laughs (which the audience shockingly and consistently provides). Saeed on the other hand is given too much screen time to carry out his brutal murders all the while toeing the line as a respectable member of the community.

Rahimi is less lucky in her allotted time on screen. Mirroring the actress’s real life situation, Rahimi is incessantly followed and judged based on a rumour from her past. It is this rumour of potentially imprudent romantic involvement that allows the characters that surround her to show their vicious colours or their sympathetic allegiance.

After hitting all the familiar crime story beats, including the lead character acting as a honey trap, Saeed is finally apprehended. It is here that Holy Spider changes course and finds its own voice. It is the aftermath that Abbasi wants to explore. He brings multiple strands of society into the courtroom and pits them against one another. Some begin a hero worship of Saeed for ‘cleaning’ the city streets, others stay silent until they can join the winning camp, the judges and imams deliberate how to please the higher-ups and the people at the same time and Rahimi demands to see justice at whatever cost. Everyone has skin in the game and it makes the unpredictable final scenes particularly nerve-racking.

There’s a looming presence that towers over all characters in Holy Spider and finally ensures punishment for Saeed’s self-satisfied rampage. This force is referred to as Teheran. No one is immune to the judgement ‘from above’. Not Saeed, not Rahimi, not even the police and the judicial body of Mashhad. In the end, it isn’t the will of the people nor justice that prevails. Horrifying, but not that surprising – what prevails is optics.