interpreters Tsar Amir-Ebrahimi, Mehdi Bajestani, Arash Ashtiani
premiere January 13, 2023
Although his previous film ‘The Frontier’ (2018) was a pleasant surprise, a crime and romance story starring trolls, the Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi did not try to repeat the formula that had given him such good results. In ‘Holy Spider (Holy Spider) he completely changes the record, without neglecting some of his criminal adventures, to show it from the perspective of a young Tehran journalist: Hunting and capture of a murderer who hunts with prostitutes in the suburbs of MashhadIranian pilgrimage city.
But beyond the strict intrigue, it lacks surprise in the classical sense, because after 20 minutes we learn the identity of the culprit, the ‘Holy spider’ is an analysis. The blindness of the fanatical and moral violence of Iranian societybecause the divinely inspired serial killer does not shy away from doing the dirty work of the police and good-thinking minds, he removes what he sees as social scum, and his arrest becomes a sacrilege for certain strata of society.
The meticulousness shown while shooting the first murder and describing the daily life of the murderer is revealed in the last part of the film with a strong criticism of a certain social morality and the demagogy on which it is based. The final sequence is eerie, not because it’s violent or unpleasant, but because it’s far from it, but because it explains what it’s like. criminal conscience legalized by the system itself: the snake’s egg, the title chosen by Ingmar Bergman for his movie about the germ of Nazism.