Between the summers of 2000 and 2001, an Iran-Iraq war veteran and construction worker named Saeed Hanaei perpetrated a series of murders targeting sex workers in and around the city of Mashhad, a major economic and spiritual center of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hanaei managed to kill 16 women before he was finally arrested, unapologetically confessing to his crimes, which he considered to be a religiously justified campaign of moral cleansing. Though he was ultimately found guilty and executed by hanging in the spring of 2002, Hanaei's trial quickly snowballed into a media spectacle, in which it became a cause célèbre among fundamentalist hardliners. For reformist and feminist elements in the Republic, the entire ordeal became a tacit demonstration of the sheer pervasiveness and extremity of cultural and religious misogyny in the country, to an extent that a major conservative newspaper, Jomhouri-e Eslami, published a front-page story displaying the faces of Hanaei and his victims, and nakedly proclaimed Iran's first famous serial killer a hero.
The Saeed Hanaei case now serves as the basis for an internationally coproduced crime procedural called Holy Spider, directed and co-written by Ali Abbasi, an Iranian-born filmmaker who now lives in Denmark. Mehdi Bajestani stars as Hanaei alongside Zar Amir Ebrahimi as Rahimi, a fictional woman journalist very loosely inspired by Roya Karimi. The real-life Karimi's coverage, research, and commentary on the case was previously the major source for a 2003 documentary on the Hanaei case by Maziar Bahari called And Along Came a Spider, and the influence of Karimi and Bahari's work on Abbasi and co-writer Afshin Kamran Bahrami's new fiction film is exemplified by its highly disturbing finale: an impressive recreation of a scene in And Along Came a Spider in which Hanaei's teenage son (played by Mesbah Taleb) expresses his admiration for his father's actions, and even physically demonstrates how the murders were carried out. Of course, Abbasi and his team take significant dramatic and editorial liberties throughout the film, and this ending sequence is no different. And the apparent embellishment here, in particular, underscores both the film's rather effective virtues, as well as its debatably morbid and sensationalist flaws. In the documentary, Hanaei's son demonstrates how his father killed women using a throw pillow. In Holy Spider, he has his little sister stand in for a victim.
As far as "true crime" thrillers, it's hard to argue that Holy Spider is that formally exceptional. This is not to say that the production is not technically proficient, but its distinctions are rooted more in political abstraction and texture rather than major deviation from formula. It seems rather obvious to me that the primary selling point for Abbasi's film - which is being distributed in the U.S. by Utopia following significant festival buzz - is the juxtaposition of "true crime" with agitprop. Though "true crime" is very popular on its own, Holy Spider stands to draw in a lot of people who tend to be turned off by the genre's macabre and sometimes pornographic connotations, but who would be more interested in a film that, rather inevitably in this case, uses an only superficially "extreme" scenario of one individual's pathological obsession, misogyny, and sadism in order to critique its continuity with a society that socializes misogyny and sadism. There's also no getting around a certain bravery on the part of its Iranian and diaspora participants. Though the Hanaei case was already adapted in 2020 by Ebrahim Irajzad, shooting this new film in Iran would have been impossible due to both its explicit content and its equally explicit critique of the Iranian state, as well as because Ebrahimi herself was exiled from the country in 2008. All involved, though especially the cast members still living in Iran, are taking enormous risks in bringing this story to light, in ways that no American making yet another biopic about any one of our mass-produced serial killers could possibly imagine.
I'm not prepared to dismiss the significance of either subjective novelty or sociopolitical themes in this case, per se. But there is an extent to which I think it prudent to question the position of Holy Spider within a generic context. I can't help but recall the recent discourse and controversy surrounding the Netflix miniseries Monster, which was on the one hand praised in some circles for its depiction of the continuity between latent homophobia and racism and the ability of Jeffrey Dahmer to get away with his crimes, whereas there was a discernible tension aroused by the generic "true crime" fiction's questionable ethics in terms of how much or how little it focused on the criminal, rather than the victims. There are no easy answers to these questions where it concerns artists, who may on the one hand believe that the exploration of pathological extremity is a necessary facet of revealing aspects of the human condition and society, but are nonetheless making a devil's bargain in terms of how much they might simply be, and without conscious cynicism, stirring up base and vicarious thrills that come at the expense of those still living with traumas that can not be holistically mediated, only exploited and capitalized upon. Add geopolitical concerns to the mix, such as the ways in which certain kinds of films produced in the West work to propagandize and normalize perceptions of diplomatic enemies, and Holy Spider becomes an especially tricky film to appraise, indeed.
The decision to open the film not from the perspective of Hanaei, but from that of one of his victims, proves an apt choice. We see her getting dressed for the night - visible bruises all over her back and arms - and we follow her through the dispiriting process of changing in a public bathroom, being picked up and performing explicit fellatio, and numbing herself by buying and smoking opium. Insofar as the Rahimi character's investigation inevitably leads her to theorize that the police are themselves silently condoning Hanaei's fatwa against these "unclean" women, there is also a broader point to Holy Spider concerned with the conspiracy of silence surrounding the profligate poverty, addiction, and sexual exploitation that seems just as endemic to the identity of this supposedly holy city as its major religious sites. What's more, there is a certain brilliance to the way in which Abbasi dramatizes Hanaei's brutal, explicitly psychosexual killings, and the manner in which these unseen realities are thoroughly obscured, in the end, by how his son imagines they occurred. Encouraged by those in his life not only that his father did nothing wrong, but rather that he did something heroic, he emulates him in a manner that suggests a clean, clinical process in which the strong man merely disposes of a passive object. The reality that Abbasi depicts is, of course, messier, not only because Hanaei's enjoyment of the killings is demonstrably visceral and perverse, but also because his victims are actual human beings, who react in starkly different ways to their individual situation. By asking the right questions about everything that was left out of the "official" narrative of the Hanaei killings, Abbasi and Bahrami craft a narrative that is mostly successful in humanizing the women who are killed, but also, just as importantly, de-romanticizing the killer mythology.
The question remains, however, the extent to which the filmmakers' attempts to de-romanticize Hanaei has resulted in a character that is overly pathological to an extent that hurts, rather than supports, the film's larger political critique. Bajestani's performance is good for the character as written, but there's a night and day difference between the narcissistic exhibition he gives at his trial, his wetted eyes vacantly perceiving a divine providence of which only he is aware, and the just as fanatical, though much more grounded and soberly emphatic individual we see interviewed in Bahari and Karimi's documentary. I'm perfectly open to the notion that I've merely been taken in by a psychopath's shallow affect, but I still can't help but feel that the character that Holy Spider conjectures from the unseen aspects of the Hanaei case is something of a convenient fiction. A scene in which Hanaei makes love to his wife Fatima (Forouzan Jamshidnejad) while taking more pleasure in the fact that the corpse of one of his victims is still rolled up in a rug in their apartment, suggests to me that this is a character whose inspiration is drawn far more from understandings and representations of serial killers in Western media than from either the facts of the case or their particular sociopolitical context. Though ostensibly a freer and less fundamentalist society, the United States has proved to be the number one manufacturer of serial killers, none too few of whom have at least claimed that they were motivated by a higher power to do what they did. To conflate this generalized understanding of serial killer pathology with an individual like Hanaei, whose view of the expendability of "unclean" women proved demonstrably more pervasive in the social and political climate of the Islamic Republic, seems to me a dubious and dramatically underwhelming proposition. One of the best scenes in Holy Spider is one in which Hanaei extends his hand out a window and feels rain falling that isn't actually there. But the overly pathological approach to the character keeps this scenario in the much safer territory of megalomaniacal delusion. But what is more terrifying, and dramatically original? A man who murders because he's a certifiably mad pervert, or a man who murders and then feels as though he is being sustained by faith alone? I could easily imagine a fiction film about Scott Roeder, the anti-abortion extremist, taking a tact similar to Abbasi with Holy Spider. But the choice would be just as creatively lazy and, more importantly, socially and politically irresponsible. As hard as it can be to stomach, misogyny and religious fundamentalism are not aberrations of abnormal minds, and not all "serial killers" are insane. Some are, indeed, psychologically normal individuals who simply follow the value systems within which they were socialized to their logical conclusions.
The case of Holy Spider is one of a fairly formulaic, but overall well-executed "true crime" film that nonetheless critically stumbles in terms of its articulation of how superficially "extreme" or "fringe" violence is, in fact, a predictable product of normative values. This is, counter-intuitively, nowhere more exemplified than in the portrayal of Hanaei's wife Fatima. Bajestani and Ebrahimi may be the stars, but the standout performance belongs to Jamshidnejad, who gets to portray an at once traditional, conservative Muslim woman who is not, anymore than Hanaei's victims, merely a passive and servile entity in the narrative. Her role is essential in that, while she may not be as combative and independent as Rahimi, she serves to give Western audiences a glimpse behind the long black veil of hegemonic repressions and cultural norms, to see a complicated woman who should represent Iran in their minds just as much as any imam or politician. Even still, in conjecturing about the "unseen" aspects of the Hanaei case, Abbasi once again seems to conspicuously avoid the most inconvenient possibilities. In the film, as in reality, Fatima maintains her unconditional love for her husband in spite of what he did, and in spite of how the disproportionate burdens of his actions inevitably fall on her and the family. But it is telling that, in a scene in which she is confronted by her son about why Hanaei did what he did, she chooses to tell him that the women he murdered were "the type who sold drugs to kids." Which is to say, Abbasi and Bahrami contrive a dramatic scenario in which a fundamentalist woman feels the need to lie to her teenage son, to avoid the central spiritual and patriotic motivations of her husband's crimes. It's perhaps needless to say, but this character and Jamshidnejad's more conflicted and evasive performance when she ends up being interviewed by Rahimi in the film simply doesn't gel with what the real Karimi's real interview with the real Fatima highlights. When asked about whether she'd noticed anything amiss during the period of the murders, she smiles, seeming more amused and impressed by her husband's ability to deceive her than the content of his deception. Throughout the interview, she remains remarkably unaffected, hoping for her husband's release, but expressing her trust in God's will to sort out what is right. What doesn't enter into it at all is any particular concern for his victims and their humanity. It doesn't even really matter why Hanaei killed them. All she wants is her husband back, and everybody says he didn't do anything wrong.
Maybe we just don't see the grief and torment. Maybe this is just a mask that a Muslim woman wears so she won't be seen as reproaching her husband. Or maybe, as with Hanaei's actions themselves, this is simply the way things are, at least for some people. Forget the hardliners and fanatics for a second. To them, these women that Hanaei murdered were "a waste of blood"; which is to say, a waste of the blood of the martyrs, who sacrificed themselves so that the Islamic Republic could flourish. But the conspiracy of silence is not solely arranged by these most extreme of moral fundamentals. It is reflected in that "out of sight, out of mind" affect. Holy Spider lacks a certain conviction in this sense. It becomes yet another in a long line of Western productions about the vague Islamic world as both vividly horrifying, and, thus, vicariously thrilling; a playground for our imagining of a preternatural and essential awfulness that is not, then, credibly concerned with illuminating the relationship between society and the individual. There are plenty of women characters in the film that express reactionary views, but none who do so in a plain and unemotional way as to realistically reflect upon and humanize them as social beings who hold to normative values, prejudices, and disregards just as unquestioningly as any man. The deeply saddening point of Holy Spider should be something to this effect: That you don't have to be crazy to do what Hanaei did. You don't need to be turned on by violence against women, you just need to not care about them as human beings. You don't need to be pathologically "extreme" to be an extremist.
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