Holy Spider: serial-killer thriller that’s profoundly compelling and intentionally horrifying

Based on the real case of a family man who murdered 16 prostitutes in Mashhad, Iran, this Cannes premiere will chill you to the bone

Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider, the surest controversy magnet in Cannes so far, is inspired by the real case of Saeed Hanaei, a family man and father of three who murdered 16 prostitutes between 2000-2001 in Mashhad, the second most populous city in Iran. There’s already been a documentary about him, called And Along Came a Spider (2002), named after Hanaei’s method of trussing up his victims before depositing them on the city’s hilltops. He would then proudly phone in the whereabouts of their bodies to the press, and declare he had yet again done Allah’s work.

Whether a Zodiac-like procedural on the exploits of this self-proclaimed holy vigilante is exactly what the world needs to see, and whether a man should have directed it, will be talking points up and down the Croisette for days. Both the harrowing technique and staunch moral focus of Danish-Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi prove, let’s say, on all fronts more useful than his gender.

Abbasi is best-known for his deeply strange, Oscar-nominated Nordic-body-horror-romance-cum-police-procedural Border (2018), but will be better-known yet when the shock value and social worth of this one have been processed. It’s profoundly compelling, expertly made, and quite intentionally horrifying.

The first ten minutes are a supreme test – the most sexually explicit in the film, including a grimy close-up of oral sex, but also its bleakest. (Even so, they are assuredly not its most violent, which should serve as a further content warning.) We have not been introduced yet to Saeed (Mehdi Bajestani), but instead follow one of his victims, a single mother called Somayeh (the astonishing Alice Rahimi), as she goes about a gruelling night’s work with multiple clients.

There’s a moment with her recovering from one job, shaken, in someone’s bathroom, and placing a tiny blob of moisturiser on her wrist, that is almost indescribably sad. The pungency of this person’s predicament is too real, we can’t help but think, to be housed in Abbasi’s chosen framework of a serial-killer thriller. And yet here we are, soon watching her brutal, life-ending encounter with a predator who thinks she’s scum, and that he’s on the side of the angels.

Mehdi Bajestani as the killer in Holy Spider

After the credits break, with a surge of churningly ominous music, our viewpoint switches to Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi), a female journalist from Tehran who’s on a dogged quest to expose the killer. She thinks the police are stalling, on the basis that he’s making their lives easier, not less, on his one-man mission to sweep the streets of vice. She also suspects the clerical establishment of an organised cover-up.

This hardbitten terrier of an investigator is used to being shafted in a man’s world, having been fired from an earlier job for calling out sexual harassment from her editor, and has to suffer a repeat episode of grossly intimate slut-shaming, after spurning the advances of the chief of police.

She’s the feminist crusader the film straightforwardly requires to make a lot of its points, about a top-down conspiracy to blame women for a problem originating, as Abbasi uses his entire film to argue, in the sick hearts of men. As we come to know Saeed (renamed Saeed Azimi here, since this isn’t strictly a docudrama), we grasp that he’s a pathetic hypocrite, who pretends to have a morally upstanding home life, but gives vent to his animal urges even with the dead. Toughened on the front lines of the First Iraq War, he’s a grey-bearded, deluded monster hiding in plain sight, who cruises for his prey on a motorbike at night.

Since Saeed uses the women’s own neck-ties to kill them, the film carries around a disturbing resemblance to Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972) – a very dated, far more queasily exploitative piece of work than this, where suspense was king, mastery was key, black comedy prevailed. Alert to this and Psycho’s tradition, Abbasi is still bold enough to dabble with moments of hysterical humour. One tough nut cackles quite believably in what she presumes is foreplay, but then, beyond death, seems to be taunting Saeed as a corpse, after the most savage and 18-certificate-horrific of the attacks – one bound to induce some grey-faced walkouts.

The difference between Hitchcock and Abbasi is that we’re certainly not sitting though the latter’s film as kicky entertainment. There’s a tonal shift into judicial debate, borrowing some forensic methods from Asghar (A Separation) Farhadi, to examine what’s more systemically appalling than even Saeed’s stated defence: the widespread support he gets as a matter of course. If courtroom melodrama seems like a whole other form of exploitation to some viewers, so be it, but Abbasi could hardly be clearer about what he’s saying, and his stone-cold clincher of a coda chills you to the bone.

115 min, cert and UK release tbc