The fall of 2022 saw civil unrest and protest erupt in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody after she was accused of violating the country’s law regarding the proper wearing of hijabs. The nationwide uprising of women and young men alike has highlighted the growing resent of many Iranians toward the Islamic Republic and its lack of rights for women, symbolized by the requirement that they cover their hair with hijabs when in public, with some polls showing that nearly 75 percent of Iranians now oppose the law. As the world watches the Iranian government attempt to tamper down the protests, a new film shines a light on the culture that has sparked unrest across the country.
Holy Spider is inspired by the real life story of Iranian serial killer Saeed Hanaei who murdered 16 prostitutes from 2000-2001. In this partly fictional retelling, journalist Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) arrives in the Iranian holy city of Mashhad, assisted by local journalist Sharifi (Arash Ashtiani), to investigate the serial killings of sex workers by the Spider Killer, an Iraq-Iran War veteran Saeed (Mehdi Bajestani) who believes he is cleansing the streets of sinful prostitutes who make a mockery of the holy city of Shi’a Islam’s Imam Reza.
Holy Spider gets its title in part from the moniker of the killer at the center of the film of course, but metaphorically and thematically, the spider it references is the manner in which Iranian culture and its practice of Islam reaches out in multiple directions corrupting its inhabitants like a spider web. The oppressive attitudes toward women that permeate how they are viewed and treated are of course baked into the greater political system, as is displayed through the Imam character that Rahimi and Sharifi must meet with when seeking justice, but more importantly from the perspective of the film, infects the attitudes and belief systems of the bulk of the Iranian populace from Saeed down to his children son and daughter. This point is made most powerfully in the film’s ending that finally reveals what Saeed’s son Ali told Rahimi when she interviewed him about his father’s killing spree and belief system, how Ali used his younger sister to explain his father’s goals, and his sister’s reaction, or lack thereof. And while Saeed cites the protection of Islam as his motive for killing the prostitutes, his behavior with the body of one of his victims following her murder betrays a possible sexual motivation behind his behavior as well, speaking to the repressed sexuality that often comes with growing up in a religiously rigid culture. Repression harms not just the subjugated, but even the portion of a society that is not subjugated as they must modify themselves and become worse versions as a result. This cultural critique can be extrapolated worldwide when it comes to the issue of misogyny and systemic mistreatment of women; how the codification, whether formally or informally, of discrimination and subjugation of women trickles down to how everyone views women and women even view themselves. Saeed’s wife is one of his most vocal defenders and thus, detractors of the prostitutes that he killed, citing their unscrupulous and sacriligious behavior as justification for their murders.
The critique of Iranian culture from co-writer/director Ali Abbasi encompasses not just the misogyny that emanates from religious fundamentalism, but also religious martyrdom in the country. Saeed explains his killings by claiming that God made him do it in order to protect the sanctity of the holy city of Imam Reza, but it is made clear in the film that Saeed also suffers from a bit of survivor’s guilt from not dying a martyr in the Iraq-Iran War of the 1980s. As much as he claims to be acting from religious duty, Saeed also clearly sees the killings as an opportunity to show himself as a hero in the fight for Islam in the same way that his dying valiantly on the battlefield would have. Holy Spider’s portrayal of Saeed raises fascinating questions. People who believe that God speaks to them are usually branded as at least partially insane. Saeed clearly suffers from PTSD as a result of his service during war, but he has also been tangled in the fundamentalist web that makes up Iran. Do these factors make him a simple madman or has he been victimized in a way by a system that has groomed him and all of its citizenry toward misogyny? Bajestani’s performance, one of the year’s best, captivatingly makes this point as he convincingly portrays the multifaceted nature of Saeed, delving into the psyche that created this individual monster while encapsulating the trickle down effect that a government and its entrenched systems had in creating him.
Abbasi’s decision to tell this story from the perspective of all involved, Saeed, Rahimi, Ali, and some of the prostitutes that become Saeed’s victims makes the overall critique of Iranian society and its depiction of the far-reaching effects of the theocratic regime that much more powerful and thorough, covering the issue and its many threads from all angles and emotional and psychological vantage points. Through Rahimi, we see how the systemic mistreatment of women effects the everyday lives of Iranian women, from their career experiences (Rahimi is looked down upon by the men she encounters due to rumors of an adulterous affair that she participated in) to the specter of justice under an Islamic republic. The experiences of the prostitutes speak to the extreme manifestation of the subjugation of Iranian women and the lack of resources and support poorer, drug addicted women have in the country. Seeing the effects of the “spider’s” web makes Holy Spider a highly effective documentation of Iranian society and critique of misogyny in general.
Holy Spider contains all the entertaining elements of a psychological thriller involving the hunt for a killer with topical themes and subject matter that bring real life debates and circumstances to the big screen to be pondered by a captivated audience. Zar Amir Ebrahimi is a fantastic lead in the film, serving as the avatar for Iranian women writ large and the audience itself as it questions the Iranian regime’s treatment of women and zeal to see justice served I the immediate while working toward longer lasting change. Mehdi Bajestani also powerfully depicts a madman who is representative of a culture that encourages the degradation of women and veneration of religious martyrdom. This film is an impactful study of the systemic and cultural consequences of the systemic oppression of women and what the struggle against its entrenchment costs.
Image: Utopia
