hOLY SPIDER
Type: political-religious thriller
Director: Ali Abbasi. With Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, Mehdi Bajestani, Arash Ashtiani, Forouzan Jamshidnejad, Sina Parvaneh, Nima Akbarpour, Aria Farjadi
Tsar Amir Ebrahimi in a scene from the movie “Holy Spider”.
Between 2000 and 2001, a serial killer strangled sixteen prostitutes in the holy city of Mashhad, whose mosque attracted twenty million pilgrims every year. His name was Saeed Hanaei, a volunteer in the Iran-Iraq war, then confessed after his arrest (he was hanged in 2002) but considered by many – then and still today – a kind of martyr and hero of the faith.
Starting from this news story, the Danish-born Iranian director Ali Abbasi has made a thriller about a journalist who is determined to find out why the authorities are not doing everything they can to unmask the killer.
Tsar Amir-Ebrahimi and Arash Ashtiani in “Holy Spider”
Who the “holy spider” of the title is (so nicknamed because he attracted the victims into his “web” to kill them) we find out very soon and the story is not always able to maintain the tension that the yellow plot would require.
On the other hand, both the fanaticism that transformed a “champion of morality” into a killer and the religious and political complicity who seem to want to transform a murderer into a popular hero, with a contempt for the woman that the last testimony – that of the murderer’s teenage son – is responsible for imprinting in the viewer’s memory.
For those who want to know what the Iranian power would like to hide.
iO Woman © REPRODUCTION RESERVED