"Holy Spider" | © UtopiaThe world's obsession with true crime is as old as crime itself. With every new format and possible presentation, another wave of such media arises, making us think, each time, that the collective obsession is a new phenomenon. Oh, how wrong we are, for as much as things change, they remain the same. One aspect constant with every iteration of the true-crime craze is the glorification of the killer. False equivalencies manifest, equating human monsters to criminal geniuses. Great purposes are projected unto them, ideas of grandeur and abstract magnetism. From popular podcasts to Netflix's Jeffrey Dahmer show, true-crime narratives make celebrities out of murderers and exploit truth into legend.
Ali Abbasi's latest film challenges this state of affairs. Reenacted violence and political commentary are at the center of Holy Spider's controversial reputation, but its demystification of the serial killer figure constitutes the picture's most radical provocation…
Inspired by a real-life murder spree in Iran at the dawn of the 21st century, Holy Spider blends fact with fiction, using the latter as a conduit through which one can better grasp cinematic truth, paradoxical as that might sound. Because of its content, it was produced in Jordan, outside Iran and the grasp of state censorship. The action starts in 2001, on a night most dark in the holy city of Mashhad, the country's second most-populated metropolis, often described as its spiritual capital. It's been almost a year since the first body was found, and though the narrative will soon structure itself around two protagonists, this prologue follows neither. On the contrary, it focuses on Somayeh, who walks alone through streets so dark they appear to be rivers of ink.
Like the killer's preferred victims, this doomed woman is a sex worker made desperate by her unfortunate circumstances. At home, she has a child to feed and no one to lend a hand while the monster of addiction cries from within, eating away at her resolve, body and spirit. In such a supplicant state, it's hard to refuse the promise of cash from a stranger even though everyone knows there's a murderer at large. Like the remaining movie, this early passage is captured in a register close to realism, right down to explicit sexual acts performed in ways that make one second-guess their supposed simulation. However, there's also a heightened quality at hand, the night made nightmare of brutality unbound.
It goes beyond Nadim Carlsen's lensing, its dense darkness, encompassing a score full of metallic droning that makes one feel as if the story is unfolding under the belly of a giant beast. We sense its looming weight, a titan with its mouth open, ready to devour those unlucky enough to find themselves bathed in its shadow. Not that the killer himself is so larger than life as all that. Indeed, Abbasi makes the city, the state, the system, into the great evil rather than the individual whose monstrosity is presented as something banal rather than extraordinary, every human detail cutting away at the potential for myth.
Moreover, the director doesn't allow that malevolent entity to reside at the story's margins or in its shadows. Instead, Abbasi shines a spotlight on the man. He's Saeed Hanaei, a construction worker whose reality couldn't be more divorced from the avenging angel or demonic haunting one might feel inclined to associate with his serial killing reputation. Instead, the director and his actor, Mehdir Bajestani, invest in depicting the pathetic side of his nature, the physical fragility, a smallness of thought, the hateful insecurities of a middle-aged man living within a patriarchal environment, feeling impotent and entitled.
Amid a media landscape where real-life monsters are so often perceived as eeriely above notions of humanity, Hanaei comes off as a delusional but mundane person whose hideous actions don't ensconce him in grandeur, holiness, or majesty. That's one half of Holy Spider, a dramatization of evil that repudiates cliché even as it moves through the usual motions of true crime drama. Concurrently, Abbasi's film follows a fictional journalist whose efforts to find the killer's identity echo other similar stories littered throughout cinema history. There are hints of Zodiac here, as well as The Silence of the Lambs' Clarice Starling, among others.
That said, Zar Amir-Ebrahimi's Rahimi deserves to be considered within her own right as a phenomenal character that serves as a vessel through which the project takes aim at an unjust regime, depicting how conservative values twisted to authoritarian extremes trickle into the quotidian of citizens, infections of repression and sanctioned violence. Amir-Ebrahimi won the Best Actress prize at Cannes, and it's easy to see why Vincent Lindon's jury felt compelled to honor her. If Bajestani provides a tour de force of abhorrent behavior grounded in notions of masculine toxicity, she works within a milieu of perpetual outrage, nervous physicality, furious eyes.
In many ways, the lead actors embody the project's ultimate mission, its most apparent tonal wavelength. Like Rahimi's characterization, Holy Spider is brimming with anger, bubbling over in violent ways that sometimes can render its point in broad gestures that are no less effective though they lack finesse. Like Saeed's self-made hell, it's tough to watch and often frightening, a thriller cum neo-noir transitioning into procedural horror before it finally metamorphoses into outright morality war. The film is brash and bold, blunt and beastly. It’s a provocation and a sociopolitical diagnosis, full of robust craft, raging conviction.
Now in theaters, Holy Spider is Denmark's official submission for the 95th Academy Awards. Considering Abbasi's international fame, a Cannes win, and the country's usual luck with the Academy, this feels like one of the titles bound for the Oscar shortlist. But can the film make it into the final five? Only time will tell.