Holy Spider: A terrifying web of inequality and injustice

Selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, Holy Spider is an internationally co-produced crime thriller film directed by Ali Abbasi. It is based on the true story of Saeed Hanaei, a serial killer who killed 16 sex workers from 2000 to 2001 in Iran. The film depicts how he commits the crime and the public reacts to his execution, along with a fictional female journalist investigating the case.

(Source: The Guardian)

Iran, female sex workers being murdered and journalism - it appears at the first sight to be a conventional crime movie which reveals the devastating gender inequality in Iran and glorifies the courage of journalists at the first sight. Yet, its sequence structure distinguishes it from the movies with similar themes like She Said and The Silence of the Lambs. Unlike the traditional crime films which create suspense by concealing the truth in the first half of the films, Holy Spider discloses the identity of the killer and how he murders the girls at the very beginning. It is not suspenseful, but it is emotionally powerful. None of the audience can escape from the strong sense of terror throughout the whole movie.

There are three major layers of terror in Holy Spider. It starts with the murdering scene directly. Saeed picks up the woman, takes her to his home, strangles her with her own head scarf, and dumps her in the remote area. He acts without any hesitation, and performs this routine again and again. There are many close shots focusing on his calm faces and hollow eyes, which directly trigger the audience's emotion with a strong sense of horror. He considers the sex workers dirt polluting the city, rather than actual lives with friends and families.

Saeed’s cruelty is never demonstrated in his everyday life. Despite the occasional mental breakdown, he behaves like a normal husband and father. He has dinner with his family, plays with his daughter and chats with his neighbours like you and me. These seemingly normal behaviours create a chilling contrast with his act of killing. In the Iranian Islamic society, men are privileged and sex workers are further regarded as corrupted women who should be removed. Saeed also suffers from the loss of masculinity after he was degraded from a veteran to a builder, and the sense of loss is amplified by the gender hierarchy in society. Thus, he would like to prove his masculinity by killing the women marginalised in society. In a society where injustice and inequality are justified, the mind of many people may be twisted like Saeed. Their actual mentality and thoughts may be very different from their everyday behaviour. We can hardly spot a potential criminal in our neighbourhood. The uncertainty and complexity of humanity make me feel a tinge of fright creeping up my neck. Such fear is more powerful than the murdering scenes which shock me straight away.

(Source: Gateway Film Center)

At last, Saeed is executed. When the movie seems to end, another climax comes. Hundreds of people support Saeed, gathering and chanting outside the court during the trial. His wife genuinely believes that he just carries out the sacred cleansing on behalf of Allah, so he is “clean” and innocent. At the end of the movie, the journalist who investigates the case replays the video of interviewing his twelve-year-old son. He re-enacts his father’s procedure of killing in uncomfortable detail. He takes the journalist into the apartment like what his father did to the victims, and asks his younger sister to help act out the killing. She knows how to play her part, laying down on the floor and remaining motionless as her brother puts his knee on her chest and his forearm on her throat, his hand tugging on her headscarf. She finds it amusing, and pride creeps into the young boy’s tone when praising his father’s heroicity, “he’s a great man.”

This closing scene pushes the sense of terror to its peak. The more innocent the kids are, the more unsettling it is. In a society where systematic oppression and sexism are normalised, the children grow up believing that such murders are justified. The injustice is reified from generation to generation, and the children can no longer distinguish the black and white. From their point of view, sex workers are not human, killing is not a crime, and sexist discrimination is sacred. It seems that another spider killer’s rampage is unavoidable in the future. The closing scene gives the audience an ultimate emotional punch, leaving a strong aftertaste of terror, disparity and hopelessness.

(Source: IMDb)

In addition to engaging the audience with rich layers of fear, Holy Spider explores the problem of sexism from multiple perspectives. As complicated as a spider web, sexism in Islamic countries is an intersection of individual violence, institutional discrimination and generational inequality. The injustice is institutionalised and widely accepted as a social norm. Nobody considers it a problem that should be changed, so the inequality has been omnipresent for centuries. Holy Spider is not just a crime film. It is a powerful movie condemning the whole social and religious system.

There are dictators oppressing civilians without any punishment, and civilians being prosecuted without doing anything wrong. We all acknowledge the problem in current social structure, but what hope is there for a better future?