Holy Spider (2023)
Directed by Ali Abbasi
Holy Spider is a fictional retelling of the murders of 16 sex workers by the so-called “spider killer”, Saeed Hanaei, in the Iranian city of Mashhad, a place of great religious significance for Shiite Muslims. Due to a high unemployment rate and an opium crisis in the early 00-s, many women took up sex work to survive, so prostitutes walking the streets of Mashhad became a common sight. Hanaei claimed to be on a holy mission to cleanse society from these impurities, after his wife was mistaken for a prostitute by a taxi driver. These killing have been met with no resistance by police and local authorities at the time, as investigation was very slow and reluctant. As the victim count reached 9, however, Tehran, forced to acknowledge the murders as wells as the opium crisis, sent a special investigation unit to deal with the killer. Hanaei was eventually caught, after his last victim fought back and at great risk for herself, reported him to the police a couple of days later. Hanaei’s trial was highly politicized, as religious conservatives organized rallies in staunch support of his motives and vision of society. With this, a political division came to the forefront that has been brewing since the re-election of the somewhat liberal Muhammad Khatami in 2001, with extreme conservatives on the one side and reformists on the other. After a lengthy (and very showy) trial and with considerable pressure from Tehran, Hanaei was convicted and hanged. Although most of his conservative supporters turned from him, as the fact that he’s slept with at least 13 of his victims came to light, extreme right-wing groups as well as his teenage son Ali still supported him, until his demise, saying that his father was a hero and that someone else will continue his holy work.
Iran has since relapsed into a conservative theocracy that made headlines in early September, as Jina “Mahsa” Amini dies, after being arrested and brutally beaten by the Iranian morality police for “improperly” wearing her hijab. The 22-year-old woman’s death has since sparked a revolutionary protest movement, with women burning their hijabs and cutting their hair, while protesting for basic human right and freedom for women under the slogan “women, life, freedom”. Mahsa Amini has been added to the Forbes list of the 100 Most Powerful Women.
Holy Spider premiered to a seven-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2022 and has been praised by many western critics for being groundbreaking for showing sexual and violent scenes on screen, as well for the critical depiction of patriarchal violence towards women. Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, who plays the fictional investigative journalist Arezoo Rahimi, who comes to Mashhad to investigate the violent murders, deservedly won Best Actress, as her performance was incredibly intense and sincere. The cast and crew are avid supporters of the Iranian protest movement and have been seen holding up “women, life, freedom” posters at the UK premier of Holy Spider in October 2022. Abbasi himself has admitted, that the movie has been viewed differently and more politically, since the death of Mahsa Amini, which he didn’t intend. However, he is proud to contribute to the protests and claims that Holy Spider is a highly subversive movie that finally shows women, as they are, instead of just “talking heads”, as is still tradition in state-sanctioned Iranian cinema.
Although Holy Spider has been described as an Iranian movie, it is, in fact, not. Abbasi, after studying architecture and film in Sweden and Denmark respectively, he is now based out of Copenhagen and is in self-imposed exile, for fear of political oppression, especially after the release of Holy Spider and the protest movement latching on to it, as a symbol of freedom. The movie has also been entirely financed by European film funding institutions, like the Berlin-based One Two Productions and Sweden’s Nordisk Film Production. Doing this research as well as reading the patronizing reviews by western critics, I wonder who the intended audience for this movie actually is. The answer is – us – white people.
Holy Spider is the third movie made about the “spider killer”, since his execution, the first being “Along Came a Spider” (2002) by Iranian journalist and documentary filmmaker Maziar Bahari, which follows the trial and even secures an interview with Hanaei, before his execution. This interview is conducted by the journalist Roya Karimi Majd, who worked with Bahari on the documentary overall. Many of the interview scenes in the latter half of Holy Spider are directly inspired by the interviews conducted in the documentary, some of the quotes even directly lifted from it.
Holy Spider sees Rahimi and her Mashhad-based colleague Sharifi (Arash Ashtiani) navigating the dark underbelly of Iranian society and butting heads with uncooperative policemen and local authorities. I couldn’t find any sources for this hypothesis, but it feels like Rahimi and Sharifi were heavily inspired by Majd and Bahari, although they only investigated the “spider killer”, after he was caught. Eventually Rahimi catches the killer, Saeed Azimi (Mehdi Bajestani), red-handed, after dressing up like a prostitute and going with him, as he picks her up on his bike. After he brings her to his apartment and tries to strangle her, she barely escapes and reports him to the police.
The movie claims to empathize with the plight of women, suffering from the Iranian patriarchal society, but, as a product of this same society, it fails, resulting in very male-centric movie. Although we’re shown glimpses into the life of one of the Azimi’s victims, at the beginning of the movie, the life we’re shown is miserable. We’re shown scabs, wounds and bruises. The woman goes to her usual spot and begs for opium from a local dealer to forget, how terrible her life is. We see dull eyes and badly applied make-up. This is it, these 16 women, who we don’t even know by name, except for two of them, are all wretches – no joy, no life, no nothing. We can only sympathize with them, says the movie, if they are so miserable, that they’re barely human anymore.
This dehumanization is underlined throughout the movie, as it draws a stark line between “good” and “bad” women, starting with the character of Rahimi herself. Instead of the sex worker who fought back and reported Hanaei, at great risk for herself, being the main character, we get a fictitious outsider with no skin in the game whatsoever. Rahimi is a journalist from Tehran, a well-educated journalist. A much better protagonist, than a prostitute, it seems. By the way, Rahimi’s only motivation that we get, is the way men see and treat her as well as the trauma she’s incurred from them. In lieu of an actual characterization with meaningful motives of her own, Abbasi gives Rahimi short hair, painted toe nails and an attitude, to consolidate her status as a hardened reporter.
The victims and the alleged main character’s motivations and desires, however, don’t really matter, as its main fascination is with the killer – his contradictions, doubts and convictions. Bajestani, as Azimi, chews the scenery, as though it was a delicious piece of beef jerky, with such delight and relish that I instantly understood what genre, we’re actually in. Although touted as a “Persian Noir”, the movie is instead a sleazy 90-ies erotic thriller, with all the genre conventions of its brethren like Basic Instinct (1992) or Fatal Attraction (1997). So much was I reminded of this type of movie that I almost expected 90-ies Michael Douglas to show up. Speaking of genre conventions. Since Jack the Ripper, killing prostitutes has been the favorite past-time of many a killer, including in the classic “Night Stalker” (1986) and everything that followed.
Rahimi’s fear is palpable, as she walks the streets of Mashhad or interacts with obstinate policemen, as the entitlement of the men of this society to a woman’s attention, space and body is shown with terrifying clarity. In one particularly disturbing scene, a policeman, she’s been dealing with before, gains access to her hotel room under false pretenses and makes a violent pass at her, as she tries to kick him out. After he finally leaves, she is so shaken that she doesn’t go to the police with any new information, before she entraps the killer, instead enlisting the help of Sharifi, the “good man” representation of this movie. When it comes to the brutal killing of the sex workers, however, no such clarity is employed. Instead, the movie switches from political commentary to erotic thriller mode and revels in Azimi’s anticipation before the murder as well as the act itself. Parted lips, terrified eyes, twitching legs and limp feet are shown in excruciating detail, as we observe Azimi’s horned up face, while he’s strangling the women with their own head scarfs. They don’t fight back; they don’t cry out – this privilege being reserved only for Rahimi during her heroic entrapment and daring escape.
So much does Holy Spider rely on Americanized genre tropes that it produced this particularly horrific scene:
Azimi picks up another prostitute and brings her to his apartment with the intention of killing her. She also happens to be a fat woman – and here, the movie decides to have a bit of fun. In a bizarre directorial and writing decision, this character is written as the most fatphobic comedic female fat character ever put on film (overly confident, sexually liberated, absolutely unaware of her fatness and ugliness). After Azimi realizes that he can’t strangle this beast of a woman, we are shown a fun side by side shot, as we see the woman ignorantly chatting away in the living room, while Azimi frantically searches his kitchen to find a weapon to slay the whale. After finding his choices insufficient, he proceeds to brutalize her with his bare hands and strangles her. It is the most brutal and bloody killing in the entire movie. After the most nauseating instance of fatphobia, I’ve seen in a while, we are graced with a fat joke as the punchline. Azimi struggles to get the body to his bike, visibly moaning and straining, even injuring himself in the process (laughter in the cinema). At the point, when he finally manages to get her onto his bike with a bizarrely loud thump (more laughter in the cinema), I was so stunned by this scene, that I was genuinely surprised that there was no fart sound.
In their infatuation with their version of the “spider killer” the filmmakers also made the dubious choice to not only give him more screen time than Rahimi (the main character), took weird liberties with the depiction of the trial and his mental state. They portrayed him as an exceedingly pious man, faltering at even the slightest touch of the wretches he tried to get rid of, conveniently omitting that the real killer slept with his victims. Although there was no evidence of Hanaei having a mental illness, the film also shows him having severe hallucinations, shifting the blame. As the truth has been altered, the movie Azimi never loses support and his son as well as his wife are shown to be ardent supporters.
The main theme of the movie is, of course, the toll the patriarchal system, as well as misogyny being passed down from father to son, takes on Iranian women. In the last scene, after everything is said and done, Rahimi watches the interview she conducted with Ali. He enthusiastically recreates his father’s methods of killing, meticulously explaining and showing every step on his little sister, on camera. The scene is horrific, but also underlines the sex-workers’ roles in this particular moral – if we don’t stop misogyny, it argues, they will come for the “good” ones next. Without any introspection or insight, the movie also unwittingly posits this kind of behavior and generational misogyny as the only possible future for Iran. Luckily, looking at the protests, it is not.
Holy Spider is a sleazy erotic thriller, obsessed with its killer and focused so much on the eroticism of the murders that it drowns its political message in a plethora of feet shots. The fact that it is lauded as a feminist movie by western critics boggles my mind and shows that, we, as critics should pause and examine our own biases, rooted in patriarchal and colonialist structures, and meditate on our perception of non-Eurocentric movies. As most of the reviews I’ve read bring to mind the image of a parent exuberantly praising a child for something that they’ve done 20% correctly, while ignoring everything else in the process.