Holy Spider - Movie Review

Critics Score - 9 of 10

General Audience Score - 8 of 10

Every year we get a host of crime/thriller films, the basic premise we’ve seen a thousand times. There’s a murder to kick things off. A protagonist detective or police officer walks a crime scene to begin the film and the standard formula of a cat and mouse game begins to play out, usually culminating in some kind of epic showdown. Sometimes films like Se7en, Silence Of The Lambs and even The Batman from earlier in 2022, find ways of reimagining and elevating this age old material into something exciting and different. A new film from Iranian director Ali Abbasi called Holy Spider is a wildly different approach to an age old genre film. Midway through the second act the movie hits the point where a normal crime thriller would culminate, I began to wonder what they could possibly do with the remaining forty-five minutes of runtime. But the film twists, turns. and only became more fascinating and challenging, on pretty much every level from then on. Religiously, morally, ethically, I found myself mentally challenged by the intricacies of the story and was even more intrigued to find the film is based on actual events. The film is in spoken Persian, but don’t be put off by the subtitles, this Holy Spider of a film will have you tangled in it’s web before long if you only give it a chance.

SYNOPSIS - We begin this tale with exactly what you’d expect to see. A half dressed woman is getting herself ready, we see her smoking a cigarette while she fixes her hair and begins putting on her bra. The camera from behind shows us her back, we see some marks and bruising, making us aware of the dangers that lie in wait for a woman in her line of work. She goes in and kisses her sleeping child, “I’m going out. I’ll be back when you wake up”, she whispers. After leaving, she finds another bathroom to fix her makeup and changes into some high heeled shoes before heading out to work a shift, on the streets looking for lovers. Her first customer is a man in a white car who picks her up and takes her back to his home for a horizontal tango. We see on the TV a quick glismpse of the World Trade Center towers smoking, clueing us into the approximate timeframe the film takes place in. After leaving, she stops to get some drug to smoke from a woman, then she is able to locate her next customer, this individual is content to sit in the front seat of his car, we’ll just say he keeps a lookout while she does her thing. Unfortunately for her, her third time is not the charm. Her third gentleman caller on a motorcycle takes her up to an apartment, she begins to get cold feet about the deal, but before she can get down the stairs, the serial killer they call the Spider (Mehdi Bajestani) has her on the ground of the stairwell and brutally chokes and murders her.

But as this thriller unfolds, the bodies continue to pile up while the police don’t really seem to be highly concerned with this string of killings and certainly aren’t in hot pursuit. Finally a young journalist woman, Rahimi (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi), enters the picture and takes it upon herself to try and break the case open. She speaks with the Chief of Police, Sharifi (Arash Ashtiani), about being able to look over the case files as she is positive the killer will take a misstep at some point. But the lengths to which Rahimi is willing to go and the precarious situations that she is willing to place herself in, all in an effort to track down a killer, are just the beginning of the places this film goes that subvert the typical film tropes from the genre. Even though the twists and turns that the storytelling takes don’t sustain the same type of physical thrills and suspense that the film hits in the middle of the second act, the fascinating places this story goes will challenge audiences far more than a typical, the killer has a knife to somebody’s throat, commonplace finale.

One of the biggest setbacks that a film like this faces in being able to get in front of general audiences is the subtitles. Holy Spider is in completely spoken Persian, there will be an amount of reading along the way as you navigate through the story. Also the film faces the challenge of not having any recognizable faces. Virtually nobody in Holy Spider has been seen before by anyone reading this review. Which depending on how you look at it, not being familiar with the actors or them not having recognizable faces allows them to more effectively disappear into their roles. We’re not looking at someone we know, like Brad Pitt, and mentally we understand he’s trying to portray somebody else in this film. But when I tell you, the main protagonist and antagonist, Zar Amir-Ebrahimi and Mehdi Bajestani are really incredible performances, I’m really not underselling how great they are. Otherwise, the film has relatively low production values, the score, cinematography and several of the other technical pieces were a bit lackluster, but the screenplay and events this film are based upon are everything and this critic found this film completely enthralling. There are many more pieces of art that moviegoers will get a more “cinematic” experience from in 2022, like Avatar The Way Of Water for instance, which is breathtaking in it’s entirety with it’s stunning visuals but fundamentally very shallow. By comparison, Holy Spider is a far better movie overall, it engaged me far more intellectually, made me reflect on morality, different cultures and religious beliefs in areas of the world I’m not as familiar with, and this fascinating Spider landed in my top 10 films of 2022.

SUMMARY - I absolutely love cinema that throws the standard formulas to genre films out the window and takes me in new and unexpected directions. This film does exactly that. Cinephiles should definitely make it a point to catch this one, but general audiences will also be equally surprised by how the remarkable story of the Holy Spider unravels.