In 2000-01, a seemingly ordinary man in the Iranian holy city of Mashhad began killing sex workers, claiming he was doing his religious duty to “cleanse” the streets of “corrupt women,” with 16 victims before he was caught and executed. Holy Spider takes the story of Saeed Hanaei, a builder, Iran-Iraq war veteran, husband, and father of three who was also a serial killer, and retells it via a fictional journalist character, Arezoo Rahimi, who comes to Mashhad to write about the killings, only to find the authorities disinterested in solving it because they tacitly support what he’s doing. (It’s on Netflix, or you can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc..)
Holy Spider is entirely in Farsi, and was Denmark’s submission for this past year’s Academy Award for Best International Film, as the Iranian filmmaker, Ali Abbasi, lives in Copenhagen. Much of what happens with Hanaei is drawn from reality – he lured sex workers, many of whom were drug addicts as well, back to his apartment, gave them a little money, and then would strangle them with their own headscarves. The Iranian press at the time nicknamed him the “Spider Killer,” and some even questioned whether his murders were even a crime, given the victims; wasn’t Hanaei just cleaning up the streets?
Rahimi arrives in Mashhad and immediately finds that the men are being … well, men. The best among them, such as the local reporter whom Hanaei calls sometimes to tell him where he left his latest victim’s body, is benevolently sexist towards her, trying to deter her from investigating the killings at all and constantly telling her not to go to certain areas or run down certain leads because it’s all so dangerous for a lady person. Others interfere more directly, or lie to her, or threaten her, or in one case assault her. As Hanaei keeps killing and the police seem to do nothing, Rahimi begins to investigate more directly, putting herself in Hanaei’s sights, but also creating the best chance for the police to catch him.
Holy Spider tries to be both a thriller and an exploration of cultural misogyny, but isn’t quite deft enough to do both, so once the thriller part is largely resolved with Hanaei’s arrest, the film finally gets to be one thing, and does it well. There’s no real mystery to Holy Spider – even if you didn’t know the original story, the first thing we see is Hanaei committing one of the murders. The film gains some tension from the knowledge that the longer it takes for anyone to figure out what’s going on, the more women will die, and from the unspoken conflict between Rahimi and pretty much everyone she encounters as she tries to cover the story or find the killer herself. Once he’s arrested, after the film’s most intense scene, the focus can be entirely on the way Iranian society, from the police and the religious authorities down to the people they’ve indoctrinated, devalues women. Hanaei even becomes a sort of folk hero to some Iranians. One victim had a child; another was pregnant when killed. Rahimi and her reporter ally even interview one victim’s parents, only to find the mother say she’s glad her daughter is dead rather than still engaging in sex work and using opiates. A woman’s life is simply not worth as much as a man’s to this society. Or this one, for that matter.
The unevenness of Holy Spider crosses into some of the direction and editing as well. The film lingers too long on the murders, coming across as lurid rather than shocking – it does nothing to humanize the victims, each of whom gets a sliver of a character before their on-screen deaths. Focusing on his face during a killing ends up giving him more screen time than the character deserves, time that could have gone to exploring more about the women he was murdering. The ending, after Saeed’s execution, is also very on-the-nose and could have gotten its point, that Saeed’s internalized misogyny and religious zealotry are cultural phenomena rather than just his individual madness, across in less than half the time.
Holy Spider still works, with flaws. It’s buoyed by a great lead performance by the exiled Iranian actress Zahra Amir Ebrahimi (profiled here last fall), who lost her career to the entrenched misogyny of Iranian society; and a strong supporting performance by Mehdi Bajestani as Saeed. Ebrahimi’s performance successfully threads the needle between making Rahimi seem to weak and making her seem implausibly strong or confident; an early scene, where she’s checking into a hotel and they try to turn her away because she’s a woman traveling alone, establishes her toughness while also setting the scene for the various indignities to come. Had the film chosen just to focus on her character, even though she’s entirely fictional, it might have been even stronger in the end.