Twenty years after a serial killer murdered 16 sex workers in Mashad, Ali Abbasi has made a strangely fictionalised account of his capture and trial
Holy Spider is a serial killer procedural which takes the procedure further than usual, despite its deployment of some pretty familiar tropes. It goes beyond the denouement and the arrest, extending the murderer’s conceited theatre of cruelty to the police cell, the law courts and the media arena.
This is a fictionalised true-crime drama-thriller based on Iranian construction worker Saeed Hanaei, nicknamed “Spider Killer” in the press, who in 2001 was arrested for the murder of 16 sex workers in the northeastern city of Mashad, and became a folk hero to the religious right for claiming to be on a holy mission to cleanse the city of prostitution. (Hanaei has already been the subject of a documentary and another feature film.)
Sitting down to this drama, I...
Holy Spider is a serial killer procedural which takes the procedure further than usual, despite its deployment of some pretty familiar tropes. It goes beyond the denouement and the arrest, extending the murderer’s conceited theatre of cruelty to the police cell, the law courts and the media arena.
This is a fictionalised true-crime drama-thriller based on Iranian construction worker Saeed Hanaei, nicknamed “Spider Killer” in the press, who in 2001 was arrested for the murder of 16 sex workers in the northeastern city of Mashad, and became a folk hero to the religious right for claiming to be on a holy mission to cleanse the city of prostitution. (Hanaei has already been the subject of a documentary and another feature film.)
Sitting down to this drama, I...
- 5/22/2022
- by Peter Bradshaw in Cannes
- The Guardian - Film News
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