Last year, much to the distress of victims’ families, Netflix subscribers spent 962.4 million hours watching Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, often pausing to objectify star Evan Peters on social media.
Ali Abbasi’s follow-up to the modern folk horror Border could be viewed as an antidote to the sickening vogue for “hot serial killers”.
Holy Spider concerns Saeed Hanaei, a real life sexually motivated murderer, who between 2000 and 2001 strangled at least 16 prostitutes in the holy Iranian city of Mashhad. A construction worker and veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, he became known as the Spider Killer, a reference to the way he lured his victims into his lair, the same apartment he shared with his wife and three children.
Despite sticking closely to contemporaneous reports and footage, the director and his co-writer Afshin Kamran Bahrami sensitively rename the killer as Saeed Azimi (Mehdi Bajestani).
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There’s something of Hitchcock’s Frenzy in Abbasi’s depiction of the clumsy, ugly murders, as desperate, terrified, impoverished women are choked with their own hijabs as part of Hanaei’s grim mission to “cleanse the city of corruption”.
The film comes into its own as a procedural, tracking dogged journalist Areez Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who received the best actress award at Cannes), as she sets out to catch a killer that law enforcement isn’t especially bothered with.
A woman reporter, recently made freelance after an editor fired her for rejecting his sexual advances, Rahimi encounters numerous stumbling blocks, all rooted in the same entrenched misogyny that allowed the Holy Spider to evade capture for as long as he did. Even checking into a hotel is an ordeal.
Ebrahimi, the film’s casting director, was a brilliant last-minute choice for the role. The actor fled to Paris in 2008 to avoid 99 lashes and a prison sentence after a private sex tape made with her partner was leaked online.
It’s a cracking, effective thriller, powered by uneasiness, and made all the more potent by the recent death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old killed in police custody after being detained for violating the Islamic Republic’s dress code for women.
