Venomous
Where is the line between excoriation and exploitation? It’s in the eye of the beholder, especially in Ali Abbasi’s Iranian serial killer drama.
HOly SPider
Director: Ali Abbasi • Writers: Ali Abbasi, Afshin Kamran Bahrami
Starring: Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Mehdi Bajestani, Arash Ashtiani, Forouzan Jamshidnejad, Alice Rahimi, Sina Parvaneh, Sara Fazilat
Denmark / Germany / Sweden / France • 1hr 58mins
Opens Hong Kong December 15 • III
Grade: B+
Back between 2000 and 2001, Iran’s second largest city, Mashhad, found itself with a serial killer on its hands. Saeed Hanaei decided the holy city needed a moral cleansing and so murdered 16 sex workers. He found his supporters – because those types always find supporters – though no one cared to question the “moral rot” that allowed men to hire sex workers. That’s fine. The women are the problem. Anyway, Hanaei was hanged in 2002 because Iranian courts don’t fuck around and shortly thereafter the docs and films about Hanaei and his crimes started.
The most high profile of these is Border director Ali Abbasi’s Cannes competitor Holy Spider, which wields its cudgel as aggressively as Border was precise with its scalpel. That earlier film, about a pair of (literally) trolls wrestling with racism and revenge was gloriously understated but also smartly unpredictable in its mish-mash of Scandinoir, romance, and social realist drama (seriously, see it). Abbasi, a native of Tehran currently living in Copenhagen, has no time for subtlety in Holy Spider, and he’s not trying to draft clever metaphors and suggest any kind of ambiguity. No, Holy Spider is an on-the-nose condemnation of repression and infuriating double standards, a film in Abbasi’s words about a “serial killer society,” not a serial killer. It’s mostly affecting, but it does come very close to wallowing in the misogynist exploitation it’s calling out – and some would argue it tips right over into it.
As grim as it looks
And it’s a really close call. The film begins with one night in the life of a Mashhad streetwalker. We meet Somayeh (Alice Rahimi) as she gets ready with matter-of-fact weariness at home, kisses her daughter and heads out for a night that will largely be defined by humiliation, getting ripped off and brutalisation. Abbasi and cinematographer Nadim Carlsen detail Somayeh’s gruelling night in tight close-up, and bask in Mashhad’s dark, grimy corners, looking far from the Holy City it claims to be (Jordan doubles for Iran). Her last trick of the night is Saeed (Mehdi Bajestani), an Iran-Iraq war vet who never got the glory he expected, construction worker and family man. When he’s not at home doting on his wife Fatima (Forouzan Jamshidnejad) and kids, he’s out on his motorbike picking up prostitutes. You see, they’re the scum of the earth that have audacity to peddle their wares near the sacred Imam Reza mosque. He takes Somayeh home and proceeds to strangle her with her hijab. It’s a protracted, garish sequence and Abbasi never takes the focus off Somayeh’s bulging eyes, her old bruises, her smeared lipstick, her suffering. By shooting the murder to be lingeringly ugly – as it should be – it’s easy to wonder if Abbasi’s making himself part of the problem. CTA or exploitation cinema?
As Saeed goes about his business cleaning up the town – he does face resistance from the feisty Zinab (Sara Fazilat) one night, but not enough – and following his own exploits in the papers, a journalist parachutes in from Tehran, Arezoo Rahimi (Cannes Palme d’Or winner Zar Amir Ebrahimi), to cover the story and the police mishandling of the investigation. Or not handling as the case may be. She gets help from local writer Sharifi (Arash Ashtiani), but still faces pushback, sexism and harassment, from cops to hotel workers, for just doing her job. Ebrahimi brilliantly taps her own experience getting a prison sentence and 99 lashes for having a boyfriend.
Safe space?
Pillar of the community
Despite Holy Spider’s lack of subtlety, Abbasi has cleverly exploited tried-and-true noir trappings to make a slick Persian crime thriller. But by breaking convention and identifying the killer early on, the focus becomes less about the “who” and more about the “how.” At every turn Rahimi finds someone more than happy to blame the murdered women for their own fates rather than a psycho killer doing “God’s work.” The women are reluctant to talk (ya think?) and their parents just want the whole ordeal to be over. Men constantly police women’s behaviour while taking no responsibility for their own. Iran’s ministry of culture lodged all sorts of protests over Holy Spider (and allegedly got the government to kill the production in Turkiye), so the adoration for Saeed the film posits seems entirely possible, especially when you remember Ebrahimi herself was the victim of a sex tape scandal that saw her career nearly destroyed and exile to France. The dude who stole and leaked the tape – who invaded her privacy, stole her property and threatened her safety – got out of jail after two months. Abbasi and co-writer Afshin Kamran Bahrami distill this one story to broader condemnation of misogyny, psychosis and religious fundamentalism, and so the resulting lack of nuance is just fine. Essential cinema, not enjoyable cinema. — DEK