Post by Dracula on Feb 19, 2023 14:09:27 GMT -5
Holy Spider(1/12/2023)
So, peak into how my mind works… ever since I heard the title to this movie in Cannes Film Festival coverage in my mind I’ve always said the title with the melody and inflection of the Dio song “Holy Diver,” which is very funny if you know the song and you know the movie, but the film is actually pretty serious and having seen it I probably won’t be doing that any more. The film is set in Iran and features a largely Persian cast and was directed by an Iranian emigre but was made outside the Iranian censorship regime and is officially Danish. The film is based on a real life serial killer named Saeed Hanaei, who murdered over a dozen prostitutes in the city of Mashhad in what were essentially acts of misogynistic vigilantism as he believed their “sinfulness” were an affront to society. The version of Hanaei featured here is lightly fictionalized and given a different surname, but is otherwise pretty much the same person. What the film does add is a fictional protagonist, a female journalist from Tehran who is ducking the “scandal” of having been sexually harassed in a job, who is investigating the murders. This character, played by the actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi (who was driven out of Iran because of a sex tape scandal) is a no-nonsense pursuer of truth and a nice counterpoint to the villain we are following through other points of the film.
All of this is in many ways supposed to be a lens on the toxic culture of repression in Iran but I wouldn’t be too quick to look at it strictly as a work about what goes on “over there.” Most of the misogyny that the killer expresses is not that dissimilar from what you’d hear from serial killers all over the world and most of the systemic cracks he exploited are the same ones that serial killers elsewhere use. In a way it seems that what distances this from the true crime narratives we’re used to is just the way people on the street talk about what’s going on, but are the outcomes really that different for the victims? At least that’s what I got from it but I also kind of feel like I’m doing a lot of the work to come to that conclusion, the film itself seems a little more… I don’t know, it’s sort of going after an easy target when it says that Iran’s theocratic regime is kind of sexist. Regardless, this is an interesting bit of true crime that does give us a peak behind the curtain of a country in a way that that country’s national cinema can’t really and I think there’s some inherent value to that. Additionally this is just a pretty well made thriller/procedural regardless. The investigative techniques of the journalist and here general depiction are both interesting and the depiction of this serial killer and the way people respond to them are both fascinating, so this is definitely a movie that’s worth a look.
***1/2 out of Five
So, peak into how my mind works… ever since I heard the title to this movie in Cannes Film Festival coverage in my mind I’ve always said the title with the melody and inflection of the Dio song “Holy Diver,” which is very funny if you know the song and you know the movie, but the film is actually pretty serious and having seen it I probably won’t be doing that any more. The film is set in Iran and features a largely Persian cast and was directed by an Iranian emigre but was made outside the Iranian censorship regime and is officially Danish. The film is based on a real life serial killer named Saeed Hanaei, who murdered over a dozen prostitutes in the city of Mashhad in what were essentially acts of misogynistic vigilantism as he believed their “sinfulness” were an affront to society. The version of Hanaei featured here is lightly fictionalized and given a different surname, but is otherwise pretty much the same person. What the film does add is a fictional protagonist, a female journalist from Tehran who is ducking the “scandal” of having been sexually harassed in a job, who is investigating the murders. This character, played by the actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi (who was driven out of Iran because of a sex tape scandal) is a no-nonsense pursuer of truth and a nice counterpoint to the villain we are following through other points of the film.
All of this is in many ways supposed to be a lens on the toxic culture of repression in Iran but I wouldn’t be too quick to look at it strictly as a work about what goes on “over there.” Most of the misogyny that the killer expresses is not that dissimilar from what you’d hear from serial killers all over the world and most of the systemic cracks he exploited are the same ones that serial killers elsewhere use. In a way it seems that what distances this from the true crime narratives we’re used to is just the way people on the street talk about what’s going on, but are the outcomes really that different for the victims? At least that’s what I got from it but I also kind of feel like I’m doing a lot of the work to come to that conclusion, the film itself seems a little more… I don’t know, it’s sort of going after an easy target when it says that Iran’s theocratic regime is kind of sexist. Regardless, this is an interesting bit of true crime that does give us a peak behind the curtain of a country in a way that that country’s national cinema can’t really and I think there’s some inherent value to that. Additionally this is just a pretty well made thriller/procedural regardless. The investigative techniques of the journalist and here general depiction are both interesting and the depiction of this serial killer and the way people respond to them are both fascinating, so this is definitely a movie that’s worth a look.
***1/2 out of Five
