Based on the true story of an Iranian serial killer, Holy Spider can’t be defined as a “bad” or “good” movie, but it’s undoubtedly different from everything we’ve ever seen.

The Unbearable Weight of Reality 

Ali Abbasi's fictionalized dark-looking thriller is about a real-life Iranian construction worker who, between 2000 and 2001, killed 16 sex workers out of what he considered a religious duty, obtaining the nickname “Spider Killer” but also a lot of popularity among the folks in the city of Mashad. 

When Saeed (Mehdi Bajestani) goes out at night hooking women that would later kill in his apartment while his wife and kids are having dinner at his parents-in-law, Rahimi (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi), a female journalist, travels to Mashad  - the second largest holy city in the world religiously ruled by Shia Islam (second-largest branch of Islam) to investigate the case. Struggling between woman discrimination and police officers that underestimate and try to take advantage of her, Rahimi tries to find the killer until she finally decides to go undercover as a sex worker.  

Eventually, at some point, Saeed picks Rahimi up with his motorcycle and takes her home, unsuccessfully attempting to strangle her with his bare hands. With proof in her pockets, Rahimi manages to escape the brutality of Saeed and comes back with the police, who arrest him. Admitting all his deeds, Saeed becomes the hero of Mashad to the public opinion by saying that all he did was clean up the street from the non-decent women that God condemned. Still, the court set him on death row and hung him in April 2002.

The Dark Framed Hardly Told Story  

Mainly composed in low light, the darkness of this movie’s frames depicts the obscurity of the characters. Probably seen as Batman in the eyes of the citizens of Mashhad, Saeed goes out only at night, wearing the sex-client mask and riding his motorcycle, cleaning up the city and bringing the “criminals” to his cave. With a central axis, Abbasi’s painful shot of Saeed riding his motorcycle (vertical position) with a dead woman tied behind him horizontally like a bag of potatoes forming a cross expresses the depression of a city that is not under the surveillance of a superhero. On the other hand, a chain-smoker woman that barely wears the hijab in public while underneath her jacket hides an Iron Maiden T-shirt gives birth to the Iran world as seen from the outside.

In its beginning, the film shows highly explicit sex scenes, which aren’t necessary to help the plot move. The story is about a murderer, not the struggles a poor sex worker has to go through. Watching on the big screen close-ups of genitals exchange might be disturbing, especially when that’s not the movie's point. Nevertheless, the brutal murder scenes make this movie extraordinary in exposing the barbarism of a man blinded by religion. According to the film, faith in God doesn’t only give Saeed “the duty” to clean up the streets of Mashhad. Still, it also throws a veil in the population's face and darkens their vision, making most of the city’s people believe that Saeed did the right thing. 

The Aftermath

Twenty years after the story happened, Ali Abbasi (also born in Teheran, where Abbas Kiarostami, an elite Iranian filmmaker, was born) uses extreme sexual brutality and physical violence to make his point. This is precisely where the audiences split up. In the Cannes premiere - the festival where Zar Amir-Ebrahimi became the first Iranian actress to win the festival’s Best Actress award - some audience members walked out of the screening due to the intensity of the film’s graphic sexual violence. The movie’s distribution tragically coincides with an Iranian woman’s claim that the authorities killed her 22 years old daughter in an anti-hijab protest in Shiraz, which gave it even more popularity and voice. This tragic coincidence extends the impact of the film and abruptly attracts western’s world attention. After being banned from shooting in Iran, Ali Abbasi - who still today can’t enter Iran - sought shooting in Turkey, but there was also banned due to Iranian government pressure. Eventually, Abbasi ended up shooting the movie in Jordan. 

“It really feels like 1942 and fighting Nazi Germany,” Abbasi said in an interview. 

Even though it shocked the world with its story and message and was Denmark's official for the 95th Academy Awards, Holy Spider expectantly didn’t make it to the Oscars 2023, as the event doesn’t have a history of nominating disturbing motion pictures. No matter if one likes the movie or not, in the end, everyone would agree on its unusuality.