Holy Spider

Viewer Advice: Contains medium-impact violence.

In this polemical Iranian noir, an intrepid female journalist hunts down a serial killer who believes he’s doing Allah’s work.

Tehran-based journalist Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who won Best Actress at Cannes) travels to the Iranian holy city of Mashhad to cover the case of the so-called ‘Spider Killer’, who has been brutally strangling sex workers with their own hijabs. Battling misogynist microaggressions and apathetic police, she joins forces with rumpled local reporter Sharifi, who follows her into the Spider’s web. But she’s not prepared for the way that public sympathy tips in the Spider’s favour, portraying him as the hero he imagines himself to be: a devout Shiite Muslim, war veteran and mild-mannered family man purging the city of sexual corruption.

Soaked in glimmering, noirish menace, Holy Spider is based on the real story of Saeed Hanaei, who murdered 16 women in 2000–2001. Iranian-born, Denmark-based writer/director Ali Abbasi – who won the 2018 Prix Un Certain Regard for his film Border – uses this thriller’s lurid genre flourishes to critique his homeland’s theocratic patriarchy. By juxtaposing the killer’s apparent everyman nature with the terror and pain he inflicts, Abbasi shows the full horror of a society that agrees some victims’ lives don’t matter.

“Abbasi has created a rich, effective thriller that shudders with dramatic tension.” – /Film