THE OPENING SCENE of Holy Spider is brutal. We see a woman — a sex worker — leave her child at home to go to work. Walking through Iran’s holy city of Mashhad, she stops at a public restroom to adjust her headscarf and apply bold lipstick. She goes on her first call of the night and does some opium. As she prepares to go home, a man approaches on a motorcycle. He offers her money. She joins him. Shortly after arriving at their destination, he strangles her.
Writer-director Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider is a fictionalized account of Saeed Hanaei, known as the Spider Killer, who targeted female sex workers in Mashhad from 2000 to 2001. The film, which premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, examines the killer’s life and the process of capturing him, led by (fictionalized) female journalist Arezoo Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi).
The opening sequence of Holy Spider illustrates the lives of the women who Hanaei (Mehdi Bajestani) seeks to eliminate. They’re poor and drug-addicted, performing sex work to feed their habit or feed their families (often both). To Hanaei, these aren’t children of God, but targets of his personal religious crusade.
During her investigation, Rahimi encounters sexism that’s culturally specific (her hotel won’t rent a room to the unmarried journalist until she flashes her credentials) and maddeningly universal (rumors about her promiscuity, a detective sexually harassing her). She’s convinced, not without cause, that the killer is being shielded from justice both as he operates and during his eventual trial.
In the film’s final moments, Rahimi watches a video she shot of the Spider Killer’s adoring young son, Ali (Mesbah Taleb). In his home, the boy playacts his father’s crimes using his young sister as a model. He describes his father’s process, demonstrating by placing his knee on his sister’s neck, later pretending to wrap her up in a carpet. As Ali coldly describes the efficiency with which his father murdered his victims (“He could rid society of a corrupt woman in under two hours,” he tells Rahimi), the camera drifts down to his sister, playing dead on the floor. This is Holy Spider’s true horror. Ali is the rising generation who, without proper guidance, will follow in his father’s footsteps.
Rahimi represents the many female journalists who investigate the abuse and murder of women. Saeed Hanaei and Ali are painful reminders of the U.N.’s most recent statistics: Globally, 81,000 women were killed in 2020, 47,000 of them by a partner or family member, and many in lower-income countries and regions. The Spider Killings happened more than 20 years ago, but the attitudes that enabled those murders remain frighteningly prevalent.
Abby Olcese is a freelance film critic and writer based in Missouri. You can find her on Twitter @abbyolcese.
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