In 2008, when Iranian actress Tsar Amir Ebrahimi was 26 years old and was enjoying a great moment in his television career, he began to circulate in the streets of Tehran an intimate video of him with his partner. The video was stolen by a supposed friend.
The authorities began an investigation, but not with the aim of discovering how the video was disseminated, but to punish the actress, because in Iran, one of the many things that are prohibited is sex outside of marriagewho can be sentenced to years in prison, lashes and even the death penalty.
Ebrahimi took his things and fled from Iran, specifically to Paris where he currently lives. This ordeal was used by her, 14 years later, to interpret the character of journalist Arezoo Rahimi in Holy SpiderAli Abbasi’s latest film.
Holy Spider
In Holy Spider, Arezoo Rahimi is a journalist who travels to the holy city of Mashhad in Iran to investigate a series of murders against women, all sex workers.
All crimes are attributed to the same subject who calls himself the “Spider Killer”. How do you know it’s him? Because he calls the local media to notify each crime, give them the exact location where the bodies will be found, and to spread his message: cleaning the streets (near temples) in the name of Allah.
Rahimi soon discovers that after 10 victims, The authorities (civic, moral and religious) have not done much to catch the murderer, because in some way it is “convenient for them to“ that someone does the “noble work” to clean the streets and end those impure women. Why catch and punish a man who serves the community and God?
Rahimi’s character doesn’t just want to catch the killer to prevent more women from dying. but how a personal search after being accused of adultery at her previous job. Rahimi, in each of his articles and reports, wants to catch a murderer who serves as a reflection of a misogynistic society.
Holy Spider and a moral crusade against women
Sex work is often measured against a moral and ethical yardstick. The characters that offer sexual services, especially for vulnerable groups such as women, children or trans people, are subjected to constant accusations and judgments by societyregardless of the circumstances by which they are there.
But at the same time, those who issue judgments and offenses, discover themselves hypocritical when pointing out who offers the service, but never who “consumes” it (generally men). Holy Spider It is the clearest example of how the base of a conservative community is a patriarchal system.
Ali Abbasi himself, director of Holy Spiderwanted that the criminal in this story was not only the Spider Killer, but the Iranian societythe one that celebrates the death of a woman who did not adhere to religious parameters, but which serves to confirm the space that men have to occupy in society inside and outside the religious context.
In Holy Spider we see Iran as a conservative country that rejects the idea of intimacy as a sinful and dirty work. But at the same time, it is the institutions that want take control of privacy individual/couple of its citizens and believers.
And there is nothing more perverse than that: The State, as if it had a notebook in hand, must know who or who is having sexual relations with under the pretext of issuing a judgment and whether the defendant deserves punishment or complies with the rules. The (sexual) power over the privacy of people is indisputable.
The control of sexual life by the State, in a contradictory way, hypersexualizes everything: where they can be played, how, and why; exclusive spaces for women and others for men; The dressing; hide body parts that become forbidden fruits; etc.
Everything screams sex and makes a difference that we know very well is dangerous, because in a patriarchal system, sex belongs to menincluding the one that is not yours: from the female genitalia, the word, the desire, to the way of exercising pleasure.
The hardest hit of reality from a movie like Holy Spider They are not the scenes of violence against women or the ways of preaching by a religious fanatic; In reality, it is to discover that the subtext of this story is still valid, more recently with the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian girl who, after being detained by the Moral Police, died of an alleged heart attack. Or the case of the girls poisoned in Iranian schools after the protests of 2022.
Holy Spider is based on a real case
Saeed Hanaei is the name of the killer both in the movie and in real life. A war veteran who in total both in fiction and in reality, killed 16 women between 2000 and 2001 for religious reasons.
In Holy Spider Hanaei is terrifying, and not so much because of Mehdi Bajestani’s great performance, but the construction of a cynical and sick portrait that is embraced by the masses: a married man, father of a family, religious and a murderer of women.
Hanaei turned to construction after returning from the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. His time in the armed conflict ended up desensitizing him to the most violent forms used in wars to achieve their goals disguised as freedom. The way Saeed Hanaei thought that would save his country would be cleaning it of impurities, getting rid of sex workers.
From August 2000 to August 2001, Hanaei strangled 16 women leaving their bodies in vacant lots on the outskirts of Mashhad. After his arrest, the man thought that he would be appreciated for the religious work he did, but the opposite happened. He was sentenced to die by hanging.
