“Holy Spider” Review!

Director: Ali Abbasi

Cast: Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, Mehdi Bajestani, Arash Ashtiani

Iranian director Ali Abbasi's film "Holy Spider" is based on a true crime that took place between 2000 and 2001, when an Iranian construction worker, Saeed Hane (Mehdi Bajastani), murdered 16- to 19-year-old women in Mashhad, a city famously known as a destination for religious pilgrimage. Posing as a customer, he picked up sex workers from the streets of his neighborhood and took them to his home, where he brutally strangled them to carry them on his own head. When asked about the motive behind the frenzied killing spree, Hanay said, "I killed women for God and to protect my religion."

Newspapers referred to the brutal murders as "spider murders" and presented Haney as a shockingly calculating executioner with the deadly precision of an arachnid. In "Holy Spider," director Abbasi uses these exact fears to create a thriller that analyzes the twisted moral dilemma of spider murders, in which thousands of people support harm and police inefficiency. So many questions were raised about this attitude.

There's some darkness in "Holy Spider," while the first few pulses of suspense come from the director's penchant for corrupt violence, a vicious web of murderers woven through the accumulated murders of vulnerable women, and a bone-chilling score that heightens the inevitable. It's a cat-and-mouse game that emphasizes nature, and what comes next is relatively equal effort. Here, Fincher meets Farhadi in a narrative that fails to succeed in either of these orientations, its moral dilemma too obvious and its investigative plot based on the fickleness of a procedural.

"Holy Spider" leans more toward courtroom allegory than it delves into mediation, betting on beaten tropes that have been done more expertly elsewhere and are plainly mistaken for the necessary subversion here. The women are repeatedly beaten and rejected, the literal hands taking oxygen from compressed pipes standing in for the symbolic hands covering the whistleblowers' mouths. Gratuity has a bitter aftertaste in violence done without much regard for severe amputation. Ending with uninspired inspiration, director Abbasi's foray into true crime doubles down on the question of morality.