Holy Spider (Ali Abbasi, 2022) (Patreon)

When I first moved back to Houston after several years in Syracuse, Jen and I lived with my parents for a bit. And they watched the local news, something that I've never really been interested in. I distinctly remember one story on Houston's more sensationalist news program, 13 Eyewitness News, dealing with a series of sex workers who had been killed over the course of a month. And the reporter's voiceover made me grab the DVR remote and go back, because I had to make sure I'd heard it correctly: "Although the victims are prostitutes, sheriffs' deputies say they intend to investigate with their full resources."

Obviously this came back to me while watching Holy Spider, a film that manages to be both plodding and infuriating. A strange selection for Cannes, Holy Spider might have been a misjudged example of Fremaux's ongoing effort to highlight genre films. Abbasi's docudrama is fairly pedestrian, more influenced by the current wave of true-crime TV on Netflix and Amazon. Abbasi is no David Fincher or Bong Joon-ho. He is not interested in disrupting the cultural fetishization of the serial killer, nor does he turn the critical lens back on the police who work to solve these depraved mysteries. In fact, Abbasi gives us the most blithely anti-psychological serial killer imaginable.

Saeed (Medhi Bajestani), the "Spider Killer," is a devout, middle-aged family man, a construction foreman and military veteran. And when he sends his wife and kids away for the weekend, he hops on his motorbike, goes to the red-light district of his hometown of Mashhad, picks up sex workers, takes them home and strangles them. As he sees it, he is doing God's work, ridding the city of human trash. And when he is finally apprehended after 16 murders, it turns out that a great many people in the city, including judges and city officials, think he's a kind of hero. What's truly disturbing about Holy Spider, however, is the way that Abbasi tends to lock us into Saeed's point of view, taking pains to show his everyday life as a husband and father, not exactly making him sympathetic but showing him to be exceedingly human.

The same cannot be said of the anonymous women he kills. We meet one of them briefly (Alice Rahimi), and learn that she is a homeless drug addict. But the film sees her as a social problem, with only a bit more compassion than its killer protagonist. (Only one late victim, a feisty, zaftig streetwalker who calls herself Miss Pussy, makes any sort of impact as an individual.) Abbasi gives us Saeed's reaction shots, Saeed's furrowed brow, Saeed solving problems to avoid getting caught, and this comprises about 75-80% of Holy Spider. His main antagonist, Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who won Best Actress at Cannes), is a reporter from Tehran who is trying to solve the Spider Killer case, despite facing blatant sexism and institutional indifference. And Abbasi's clumsy cross-cutting suggests that he sees Holy Spider as an equal match-up between male killer and female "detective." But we only get small glimpses into her life, and almost none into her psyche. Instead, she is the designated recipient of Iran's culture of misogyny, a victim who eventually catches Saeed by using herself as bait. 

Granted, these are the parameters of the true story on which Holy Spider is based. But Abbasi, while displaying no particular artistic flair, nevertheless manages to thoughtlessly employ formal film language to bring Saeed closer to us, and keep Rahimi further away. Did he think he was trying to suture us into the very misogyny the film is about? That is the sort of deft intellectual trick one might actually see from a Fincher or a Bong. But I'm hardly inclined to give this artless tripe the benefit of the doubt.