118 min | NR | October 28, 2022 | Utopia
A journalist arrives in the holy city of Mashhad to track a man strangling sex workers in the name of God. Ali Abbasi turns the manhunt into an autopsy of a culture that calls the killer a hero. The scariest thing here is how many people are on his side.
Holy Spider follows Rahimi, a journalist who travels to the holy city of Mashhad to investigate a man murdering sex workers. Saeed, a married construction worker and war veteran, strangles women he picks up at night and dumps their bodies on the edge of town. He believes he is cleansing the streets in the name of God. Ali Abbasi structures the film not as a whodunit but as a portrait of a society that quietly approves. The real subject is the machinery of misogyny that treats the killer as a folk hero.
Zar Amir Ebrahimi plays Rahimi with controlled fury. She moves through hotel lobbies and police stations where men size her up and dismiss her, and she absorbs each insult without flinching. Mehdi Bajestani plays Saeed as a tender family man and a methodical murderer in the same body. He tucks his children into bed and then drives into the night to kill. Bajestani never plays Saeed as a monster, which makes him far more disturbing. The performance locates the violence inside ordinary domestic piety.
Abbasi directs from a script he wrote with Afshin Kamran Bahrami. The camera stays close during the murders and refuses to look away. Abbasi shoots the strangulations in long takes that force the audience to sit inside the violence rather than cut around it. The handheld camera tracks Rahimi through crowded streets and gives the procedural a documentary texture. A low industrial hum runs under the city and turns Mashhad into something menacing.
The final act shifts from the hunt to the trial, and the film becomes an argument about complicity. Abbasi is more interested in the men who defend Saeed than in Saeed himself. The film overplays its hand in places and states its themes when it could trust the images. The conviction behind it never wavers. Holy Spider indicts a culture, not a single man, and it denies the audience the comfort of catching the killer.