Holy Spider

Murder She Saeed

Holy Spider
Directed by Ali Abbasi
Denmark/Germany/
France/Sweden/
Jordan/Italy 2022
Mubi Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spider spoilers within.

Well this is a stunning film. I think it may be a bit political too but I’m not the best person to pick up on stuff like that.

Holy Spider is based on a real life incident which happened in Mashhad in Iran and it starts off, for the first ten or fifteen minutes, following a sex worker who works the streets of the area to support herself and her young child when said child is asleep. We see the bruises on her naked back as she dresses up to go out in the search for clients. And we follow her on her routine as she works a couple of tricks, has a break to do some drugs and then gets on a potential client’s motorcycle as he takes her back to his home (on the regular night he knows his family stays over at his mother in law’s home). The director then pulls a ‘Marion Crane’ on the audience and this person who you thought was the lead protagonist is strangled by the guy, wrapped in a scarf and then driven and dumped some distance away. When the camera moves up and away from the killer’s speeding motorcycle, we take in a view of this beautiful city at night and the many lights make it look a little like a spider’s web, as the main title of the film appears.

Okay, so from here on in we meet the real main protagonist, a young journalist called Arezoo Rahimi, played brilliantly by Zar Amir Ebrahimi,... a character who was fired from her last job for refusing the affections of her boss. We see exactly how things are in this culture and religion right from the get go, as she is refused a room at the local hotel she has booked because of a technical error (that error being that the manager didn’t realise she was a single woman and not accompanied by a husband). She changes the man’s mind when she shows him her journalist’s ID and, suddenly the error is magically fixed. He asks her to cover her hair more with her head scarf but she refuses. And, yeah, this sets the tone for the whole film where… and it always amazes me how women in these kinds of countries tolerate this… stupid religion and beliefs are used as a way to control women and ‘keep them in their place’. It never fails to anger me.

So Arezoo has seen what a mess the police are doing of catching this ‘spider killer’ (not sure why he’s called that, it’s never really made clear other than he leaves some mark on them… something which I either misunderstood or we don’t see) and wants to break the story and catch him herself. But she faces all this discrimination because of her sex and even the local police chief just wants her to sleep with him rather than do the job. The police do not come out of this whole thing well, it has to be said and, I suspect... rightly so.

After a street walker who Arezoo was trying to help the night before becomes the killer’s umpteenth victim (with an MO so ridiculous that it’s implied the police should have been able to catch him fairly quickly), she goes undercover as bait and works the streets with a colleague watching over her, nearly getting herself killed in the process by the killer.

There’s no mystery maintained past the post credits sequence about just who the killer is either. He’s  a family man and ex-military guy Saeed, played equally skilfully by Mehdi Bajestani, who turns in a blisteringly good performance of a man a little mentally unstable but who believes himself to be doing the work of God, cleansing the streets of the immoral women who hire their bodies to a willing crowd. It’s not a one dimensional performance here… it’s not a film about too many black and white issues of morality and Bajestani gives the character a certain nuance and subtlety that serial killers in other movies often don’t receive.

And the whole film crosscuts between Arezoo and Saeed’s worlds, as we wait for their paths to intersect. And then, just when you think it’s all over and she manages to turn in the spider killer to the police, after surviving his brutal attack… the film has a fairly long end game and, it’s a little disturbing because, like I said at the start, this film is based on true events that happened in the city in the early 2000s.

Arezoo is convinced that this man’s world in the justice system is going to side with Saeed and let him ago and, to be fair, this is almost what happens. By the people in the streets, Saeed is seen as a hero for his murders of ‘corrupt women’, not a killer and, as he says himself, that his hands are clean. There are massive protests outside what passes for halls of justice in Mashhad and right until nearly the end of the picture, the director will have those not familiar with the facts guessing as to Saeed’s final fate. Spoilers here though because, I want to discuss the last scene of the movie so… look away, go somewhere else while I say…

Saeed is executed for his crimes, midst massive protest and friendly faces. At the end of the film Arezoo returns to where she came via a bus and, on that bus ride, she watches a video news item. It’s a video of Saeed’s young son demonstrating, with the aid of his even younger sister, just how his dad, ‘the hero’ would creep up on the girls and cleanse them, showing how his father might stand on their necks if they weren’t yet dead. A chip off the old block, so to speak. It’s a grim coda for a film which already is full of the terrible cultural malaise which lets these kinds of attitudes thrive. It’s a film full of equally grim moments too, such as when Saeed’s wife comes home a day early and he’s making love to her on the floor next to a rolled up carpet containing the body of his latest victim from ten minutes before… pounding into his wife as he notices the toes of the woman sticking out from the end of the carpet.

And as I said, it’s not a one dimensional movie. Nearly all of the girls working the streets are shown to be there, excepting possibly one, not by choice but by circumstance and, though they are not trafficked women, they are in this line of work due to necessity. Now I don’t believe that’s the full picture for that industry at all but the writer/director does take time to contemplate the women and show something of their circumstances in this regard. And, indeed, when one fights back and nearly escapes, one who seems to be there by choice rather than what she’s been forced to become, she comes alive again in Saeed’s head and he has to kill her again. And later on, when his defence is trying to get him off the hook, he refuses to recognise in front of the court that he is crazy… which might well have helped him escape the death sentence.

Now, as I said, the film looks absolutely spectacular. Mashhad is nothing, if not a beautiful looking city and the cinematography and different kinds of shots employed to capture it and certain details (such as a cam strapped on an actress so that her head is completely still as she rides the back of Saeed’s motorbike towards her death) are nothing short of spectacular. And it’s such a jarring clash when you think about the prevalent attitudes of the culture and religion represented by the film. In various Star Trek shows and movies they had the Prime Directive of non interference in cultures and beliefs to stop the characters acting on moral judgements and interfering with the development of the specific world they were on but, in real life it seems to me that something similar to this must be coming into play, when the outside world looks on.  

And just to drive that message home, as I finish up on the brilliance of Holy Spider (which I would whole-heartedly recommend to most people), the lead actress herself,  Zar Amir Ebrahimi, was only supposed to be the casting director. However, at the eleventh hour, the actress they had chosen dropped out as she didn’t want to run the risk of being seen on film without her head coverings. And so, Ebrahimi took the role and won the best actress Oscar at Cannes for doing so. However, here’s the thing… the film is pretty much condemned in Iran (presumably for showing the truth) and she and many of the cast and crew have had multiple death threats for their involvement with this one. All I can say, aside from noting the troublesome and obvious condemnation of a dominating religion that lets this kind of attitude survive, is you really need to take a look at Holy Spider if you want to see the women of the Iranian culture shown in a fairer and, perhaps more accurate, way.