Holy Spider

عنکبوت مقدس, Ankabut-e moqaddas

dir: Ali Abbasi

2022

Holy Spider is a movie I have been obsessed with for many months, but not because of anything to do with the movie itself, other than its name.

Every time I saw the name Holy Spider, whether it was on the list of films playing at the most recent Melbourne International Film Festival, or other festivals’ playlists, or mentioned in people’s “Best of” lists for 2022, or in discussions of contemporary Iranian movies, the first and only thing I thought of was “Respect The Rock!”

Respect the Rock is a show that’s been on radio station 3RRR for an absolute age, hosted by Nicole Tadpole, and every single edition of the show has Nicole playing a recording of herself (possibly drunkenly) singing along with a recording of Ronny James Dio singing the song Holy Diver.

Holy Diver, you’ve been down too long in the midnight sea, oh what’s becoming of me?

What the fuck does any of it mean? Who cares? It’s great! Too great to require explanation or understanding.

It’s a legendary song, recorded just after Dio and the drummer left Black Sabbath and formed Dio back, way back in the early 1980s.

What’s it got to do with anything? Nothing, nothing at all.

Got to get away, Holy Diver! Uh uh oh o o dun duh dun duh dun

So every time you see a reference to the title “Holy Spider”, you must imagine it being said loudly, in a metal voice *Holy! Spider!*

All this foolishness… Holy Spider is a bleak, brutal film based on a true story, of an awful man that killed a bunch of women in Iran.

You might say to yourself “well, the vile regime in place kills Iranian women all the time, sometimes just for not wearing a headscarf”, and I would say “Yes, that is true.”

But that’s part of the awfulness that goes along with the story: in an incredibly repressive and entirely misogynistic society such as Iran post-1979 revolution (and, most likely, before it as well), a serial killer of women would be something these morality police or revolutionary guards wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to, especially since he targeted sex workers, and drug addicted sex workers at that.

You would think they would have wanted to promote him to Ayatollah, maybe, but no.

The strong implication the film conveys is that because the higher ups in the regime felt that there were pluses to these killings, the cops on the ground, whose job it is to catch people who commit awful, awful murders, were told to look the other way.

Or that they didn’t care, because the victims were women, and if people were saying the killer was divinely inspired and doing the work of God or the imams, who are we depraved infidels to question His holy works?

The (almost) main character of this film is convinced the fix is in. She, being journalist Arezoo Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) has come from Tehran to do the work the local journos and cops won’t do, because, like many professional women, she is pretty sure if she doesn’t do it, no one will.

And as far as this flick is concerned, she is absolutely right. This killer, like serial killers the world over, knows if he targets the most maligned, the least-empowered, the weakest members of this society, that he could probably go on killing until he dies of old age, because the cops aren’t going to put in that much effort into finding him.

And the (actual) main character of this flick, based on how much time we spend with him, with his family, driving around looking for prey on his motorbike, being Saeed Azimi (Mehdi Bajistani) knows this all too well.

He knows this so well that he has to do his own promotional work, to get his crimes in the public eye, which is why he resorts to calling a local journalist Sharifi (Arash Ashtiani), who happens to be a colleague of Arezoo’s, in order to brag about his latest kill.

He calls Sharifi, who goes to the crime scenes, who then calls the cops to say a body has been dumped. It’s not somehow the other way around.

What a fucked up world. That’s entirely the point of this film – not that the world is fucked up, which it undeniably is, but that Iranian culture’s pervasive misogyny creates such people like this killer, who think their perverted need to strangle sex workers somehow has the green light from society and the hierarchy.

The first hour of the film involves not only watching Saeed murdering women, though we do see a lot of that, but tries to give us a sense of him as a person, as a husband, as a father and as a murderer. The first ten minutes of the film is watching a woman go through her sad night, working the streets of the so-called “holy” city of Masshad, and being used and abused by her clients, who do and say such awful things. At least she gets to chase the dragon for a bit, to alleviate some of her many aches and pains. By the time Saeed strangles her with her own headscarf, you could be forgiven for thinking that at least she will suffer no more.

It’s poor consolation for the daughter she leaves behind. All of these women, sixteen of them, leave someone behind for whom they were walking the streets to earn a dismal crust. No one choses to do the most hated job in a city or country where your very existence as a woman is pretty much a crime.

Arezoo’s attempts to do her job are hampered at every single step by absolutely everyone, including her colleague. The cops not only don’t help, they actively dissuade her from doing anything because, hey, she is a woman after all. One cop, who she shares a smoke with, thinks he has carte blanche not only to crack on to her, but even to tell her that if he raped her, who would ever take her word over his? If anything, she would be the one punished.

That said, a surprising number of people talk to Ms Rahimi on the record, and even on camera. She meets some other sex workers just before they end up being murdered, which gives her enough of a sense of where the predator picks up his prey that she figures the only way to catch the killer is to make herself bait.

In a different movie, perhaps an American one, that cat and mouse game would probably have occurred as the “climax” of the flick, but here it occurs midway through. I think the reason comes back to as to why the director was making this flick – it’s not to sensationalise a bunch of murders, nor is it to celebrate the heroism of the journalistic profession. It’s to put on display the sickness of a society.

Immediately upon his capture, he is feted as a holy avenger. His own (much younger wife) Fatima (Forouzan Jamshidnejad) argues that because the women her husband killed are sub-human, why is he even being arrested for it? Why isn’t he being given a medal, and a parade? His son Ali (Mesbah Taleb) tells the journos on camera that he’s looking forward to carrying on in his father’s footsteps.

Even the legal system seems like it’s going along with a sick charade in order to give the impression that the law is being followed, with the intention of letting him slip through. The key thing is, though, I think at least in the context of the movie, a lot of the thinking on Saeed’s part is clearly depicted as being delusional. Whatever dickheads in the Iranian commentariat were saying at the time, the only ones allowed to kill innocent people for no reason remain the Revolutionary Guards, the Morality Police and everyone else attached to the totalitarian regime. You can’t have the average Joe enjoying himself like he’s a state official. That’s not on. Sends the wrong message, even if he was only killing “scum” who deserved it.

This is all chilling, sickening, thought-provoking stuff. It is not a film one enjoys, really, but it’s a fascinating trawl through the ugliness of the Iranian soul. The performances are pretty solid, at least from the two main leads, being the killer and the women who caught him. It doesn’t bother me at all that she is a fictional construct, and that many of the paranoid points the flick makes aren’t literally true. The point was never about the murders – the point always was about what the murders said about a culture that at best turns a blind eye or at worst actively encourages such monstrosity against women, simply because they are women.

It’s very well made, very well put together, very moody and unsettling about Iran in the early 2000s. It is not, however, really, an Iranian film. Sure, they all speak Farsi, and most if not all the actors are Iranian ex-pats, but there is no way you could make this film in Iran without all of the cast and definitely the director being jailed or executed. There’s a reason why it’s a Danish / German / Swedish / French / Italian co-production, and why it was filmed in Jordan – because making this in Iran would doom you and probably your family, friends and maybe your neighbors too. These fuckers don’t play.

Chauvinistic, patriarchal, malevolent regimes don’t like people making films about what chauvinistic, patriarchal, malevolent regimes are really like, and what they do to people, the holy or the decadent alike.

8 times Holy Spider, you’ve been down too long in the midnight sea, oh what’s becoming of me out of 10

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“Every man shall meet what he wishes to avoid.” – don’t fear the hangman - Holy Spider