Holy Spider

Holy Spider is a 2022 Persian-language crime thriller film co-produced, co-written and directed by Ali Abbasi, starring Mehdi Bajestani and Zar Amir Ebrahimi. Based on the true story of Saeed Hanaei, a serial killer who targeted street prostitutes and killed 16 women from 2000 to 2001 in Mashhad, Iran, the film depicts a fictional female journalist investigating a serial killer.

Holy Spider was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival in May, where Ebrahimi won the Best Actress Award for her performance. It was chosen as the Danish entry for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards, and made the December shortlist.

Plot
Tehran-based journalist Arezoo Rahimi arrives in the Iranian holy city of Mashhad to investigate a serial killer targeting local street prostitutes addicted to drugs, dubbed the "Spider Killer" by the media. The killer follows a pattern of picking up women on his motorcycle, taking them to an apartment and strangling them with their headscarves, before ultimately disposing of their corpses in desolate areas on the city's outskirts.

Rahimi teams up with Sharifi, the editor of a local newspaper, to discover the killer's identity. Sharifi has been in contact with the killer, Saeed Azimi, having been chosen by Saeed as a publicist of sorts. Saeed claims to be cleansing the city in the name of Imam Reza, the eighth Shia Imam; he is shown in tears at the Imam's shrine. A veteran of the Iran–Iraq War, Saeed is married with three children and works as a construction worker.

Eventually, Rahimi and Sharifi are confident enough in the schedule, location, and patterns of the killer to lure him into a trap. Rahimi, posing as a sex worker, boards Saeed's motorcycle. Sharifi follows by car but loses them in the city's backstreets. Rahimi, armed with a pocket knife and a tape recorder, plans to elicit a confession from the murderer and flee but is soon overpowered. After loudly calling for help, she manages to escape and make her way to the police with evidence. In the following days, Saeed is arrested by the police.

As the case goes to trial, Saeed gains strong public support. When offered the opportunity to plead insanity, he reinforces his religious motivations, insisting he is only "crazy" about the eighth Imam and God. When Rahimi interviews Saeed in prison, he confesses to killing 16 women and ominously declares that Rahimi would have been his 17th victim. The following day, Saeed is found guilty and is sentenced to 100 lashes and death.

Later, Saeed is visited in his cell by his father-in-law Haji and his lawyer, who assure him that he will be spared the death sentence and that on the day of his execution, he will be secretly whisked away in a car. When the day arrives, Saeed is spared the 100 lashes, but when taken into the execution room, he panics when no one comes to his rescue, instead being executed by hanging.

After saying goodbye to Sharifi, Rahimi boards a bus back to Tehran. While traveling, she reviews video evidence gathered during the case, pausing over an interview with Saeed's teenage son, Ali, in which he proudly describes how his father overpowered and choked his victims, before re-enacting his father's killings with his younger sister playing the role of the victim.

Production
Abbasi was a student in Tehran when the 2000–01 murders took place and was baffled by the conservative response that heralded Hanaei as a hero, and by how long it took for police to capture him. Abbasi began writing versions of the film shortly after seeing Hanaei interviewed in Maziar Bahari's 2002 documentary And Along Came a Spider. Abbasi said, "In a really strange way, I felt sympathy for the guy, really against my own will. I think there was a psychotic element to the pleasure-seeking aspect of his murders, the twisted sexuality and whatnot, but there was also this strange innocence about him. It was more about how a society creates a serial killer." Initial drafts followed the events more faithfully, but Abbasi eventually deviated from them and invented the character of a female journalist, as he felt the film should focus not only on the killer but on misogyny. Additionally, he found it difficult to research the events due to the passage of time and inaccessibilty of certain documents as well as Hanaei's family, motivating him to shift to a narrative with more fictional elements. Abbasi said: "My intention was not to make a serial killer movie. I wanted to make a movie about a serial killer society. It is about the deep-rooted misogyny within Iranian society, which is not specifically religious or political but cultural. ... Instead of making another movie about different ways a man can kill and mutilate women, we want to underline the complexity of the issue and the stakes on different sides, especially on behalf of the victims."

The character Rahimi was based on a female journalist who was featured in Maziar Bahari's documentary discussing the case on camera and interviewing Hanaei. Although she was from Mashhad, she did not investigate the crimes, but she covered the trials and wrote a piece on Hanaei's execution that inspired Abbasi. She wrote that his last words were "this was not our deal", suggesting there was some kind of deal with the authorities.

The film is a co-production between Germany's One Two Films, Denmark's Profile Pictures, Sweden's Nordisk Film Production, and France's Why Not Productions, and Wild Bunch International. The production is 41.36% German, 31.05% Danish, 15.3% French, and 12.29% Swedish.

The development of the film officially started in 2016, which was then boosted by the success of Abbasi's 2018 Border. The filmmakers initially tried to shoot in Iran, but this was abandoned by 2019. A plan was made to shoot in Jordan in early 2020, which had to be pushed back several times because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, in late 2020, they decided to move the production to Turkey, where COVID restrictions were looser, but they were stalled by Turkish authorities. Abbasi has said this was because the Iranian government interfered. The production then went back to Jordan, where filming finally commenced in May 2021 and lasted 35 days.

Abbasi said Bajestani was taking an enormous risk by playing the killer. Amir Ebrahimi was initially involved in the film only as a casting director, but was cast as the journalist after an actor dropped out of the role.

In the scene where Somayeh's character performs a fellatio, a prosthetic penis was used.

Release
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 22 May 2022, where it received a seven-minute standing ovation at the end of its screening. It was released theatrically in France by Metropolitan Filmexport on 13 July 2022, in Denmark by Camera Film on 13 October 2022, in Germany by Alamode Film on 12 January 2023, and in Sweden by TriArt Film on 20 January 2023.

In May 2022, Utopia acquired North American rights to the film and released it to select theatres on 28 October 2022, expanding to nationwide US theatres on 13 January 2023. Mubi acquired the film for the United Kingdom, Ireland, Latin America, and Malaysia.

Iranian government
On 29 May 2022, the Cinema Organization of Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance issued a statement condemning the Cannes festival for awarding the film the Best Actress award, calling it "an insulting and politically-motivated move". The statement compared the film to The Satanic Verses and said it "has insulted the beliefs of millions of Muslims and the huge Shiite population of the world".

On 1 June 2022, Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Mohammad Mehdi Esmaili said Iran "formally protested to the French government through the foreign ministry". He also said, "If persons from inside Iran are involved with the film Holy Spider, they will surely receive punishment from the Cinema Organization of Iran."

Amir Ebrahimi told CNN on 3 June 2022 that she had received approximately 200 threats since winning the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival. "The problem is that they didn't even watch this movie, and they are judging this movie, just from a trailer", she said, attributing the reaction to the lack of freedom of expression in Iran.

Accusations of plagiarism
Ebrahim Irajzad, the director of Killer Spider, a 2020 Iranian film based on the same subject, accused Abbasi of plagiarism and circumventing Iranian censorship in order to make the film sooner, claiming he could have shot it in Iran had he been prepared to wait for government approval like Irajzad had to.