In the holy city of Mashhad, journalist Arezoo Rahimi (Zahra Amir Ebrahimi) is on the hunt for a serial killer, Saeed Hanaei (Mehdi Bajestani), who is killing the city’s sex workers.
Teaming up with local journalist/editor Sharifi (Arash Ashtiani), Arezoo runs into a wall of misogyny as she tries to put the case together…
I used to go through periods of watching true crime. It never became routine but every so often I would fall down a rabbit hole.
A lot of my exposure was through an investigative format, where police detectives were the protagonists - or positioned as the inevitable punishment for the murderer.
It feels like the same narrative over and over: A lot of serial killers last so long because of how they are enabled by the biases of the systems they live in (e.g. government and police).
Based on a true story, Holy Spider takes this POV as its basis, cutting between the perspective of a female journalist and the killer, when he kills, and during his everyday life.
The movie starts with one of his victims, a sex worker staring in a mirror, getting ready for work. As she dresses, her bruised body reveals the violence that is already a constant in her life.
In styling her hair and makeup, she is both signalling her profession, while hiding herself from the authorities. This sequence also establishes the film's other key theme, surveillance. This is a movie about surveillance and public presentation, and the gendering of both.
This is also a movie about hypocrisy - the killer cloaks his desires in religious dogma, but is shown lustily looming over corpses. In one scene, he has sex with his wife while staring at the exposed foot of a victim he has hidden in a rug.
While Arezoo's quest is ultimately successful, in that Saeed is arrested and executed, but the there is no sense of closure or triumph to her hard work.
The film ends on a chilling note - the killer’s son, in a to-camera address (being interviewed by Arezoo) shows his father’s killing method by using his sister to stand in as a victim - Saeed may be gone, but the misogyny which shielded him endures.
A fantastic film.
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