By Jordan Cronk

One of the year’s most reprehensible films, Ali Abbasi’s follow-up to the dumb but diverting troll romance Border (2018) finds the Iranian director switching genre registers from the fantastic to the fatalistic with an astoundingly cynical reimagining of the life and crimes of Saeed Hanaei, a real-life Shia Muslim who believed that God had anointed him to rid the city of Mashhad of female prostitutes. Divided into two parts (neither of them interesting), the film begins as a quasi-procedural, with a fictional female journalist (played by Zar Amir Ebrahimi, winner of the Best Actress prize at Cannes) doggedly tracking Hanaei’s killing spree, and concludes as a judicial news spectacle in which Hanaei (Mehdi Bajestani) becomes a local hero. 

With little style and zero self-awareness, Abbasi stages the murders with the same sense of glorification that eventually swept public perception, employing a series of horror-movie devices (sinister angles, morbid sexual innuendo) that do less to shock than encourage the viewer to root for each women’s inevitable demise. In the film’s most emblematic scene, a plus-size prostitute manages to temporarily fight off Hanaei, who proceeds to cycle through possible murder weapons until the audience is all but asked to cheer when he finally locates one that will get the job done. Lacking the self-reflexivity of something like Lars von Trier’s thematically adjacent The House That Jack Built (2018), or even the darkly comedic undertones of Fatih Akin’s otherwise miserable The Golden Glove (2019), Holy Spider commits the cardinal sin of becoming the very thing it purports to critique: speaking more persuasively to the ethical indecency of modern serial-killer narratives than any true-crime drama or murder podcast ever could.

Jordan Cronk