Ali Abbasi’s Border, an adaptation of a short story by Let the Right One In author John Ajvide Lindqvist, put its director on the map as one fluent in a dark genre idiom, and possessing transnational potential capable of enticing festivals and more commercially oriented fields. But Holy Spider returns him to the country of his birth with an even more direct statement on prejudice and repulsion than Border, and also, maybe, as much of a determination to upset and freak people out.
It’s based on a fascinating real-life case that would easily be fodder for more conventional “true crime” depictions in the podcast or TV arenas. In 2001, the film’s subject, Saeed Hanaei, embarked on a killing spree of 16 female sex workers in the holy city of Mashhad, Iran. His motive chimed directly with Iran’s cultural attitudes towards women: his avowed motivation was to wage a...
It’s based on a fascinating real-life case that would easily be fodder for more conventional “true crime” depictions in the podcast or TV arenas. In 2001, the film’s subject, Saeed Hanaei, embarked on a killing spree of 16 female sex workers in the holy city of Mashhad, Iran. His motive chimed directly with Iran’s cultural attitudes towards women: his avowed motivation was to wage a...
- 5/24/2022
- by David Katz
- The Film Stage
It is hard to watch the brutalization of women on screen, especially when you know it is a re-creation of an actual crime. But it is harder still — rightly, valuably so — if you’ve been made to notice the way this woman’s lipstick is smeared over her cracked lips, if you’ve seen the old bruises that mottle that woman’s body beneath her chador, or watched her carefully stash her flats in a crinkled plastic bag as she switches into heels in a dingy bathroom. Saeed Hanaei, the real-life serial killer reimagined in Ali Abbasi’s tense and convincing procedural, believed that God was behind his grand mission to rid his city of prostitutes. But in “Holy Spider,” the devil is in those devastating details.
Hanaei, here portrayed with brave understatement by affable Iranian actor Mehdi Bajestani, was a builder, a family man, a resident of Iran’s...
Hanaei, here portrayed with brave understatement by affable Iranian actor Mehdi Bajestani, was a builder, a family man, a resident of Iran’s...
- 5/22/2022
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Sometimes it hardly matters whether we know a story is based on truth or not. Watching Ali Abbasi’s thunderously damning Holy Spider, on the other hand, it drives a wedge into your mind knowing that a serial killer really did terrorize the Iranian holy city of Mashhad in the early 2000s, that he killed 16 street prostitutes, that there were police who conspired to help him escape and that there were people in Iran — a lot of people, he keeps assuring his family — who were on the murderer’s side. He was doing God’s work.
Swedish-Iranian director Ali Abbasi’s last film was the unclassifiable Border, a fable about outcasts and aliens in which an unfortunately grotesque Swedish customs official turns out to be a troll. Border won the prize for the best film in Cannes sidebar section Un Certain Regard in 2018. Holy Spider is in the festival competition...
Swedish-Iranian director Ali Abbasi’s last film was the unclassifiable Border, a fable about outcasts and aliens in which an unfortunately grotesque Swedish customs official turns out to be a troll. Border won the prize for the best film in Cannes sidebar section Un Certain Regard in 2018. Holy Spider is in the festival competition...
- 5/22/2022
- by Stephanie Bunbury
- Deadline Film + TV
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