Danish-Iranian director Ali Abbasi has made a fictional film about a real serial killer, who killed 16 women in Iran. It was the reactions to the killings that caught his interest. Holy Spider is presented in the main competition in Cannes.

When the police do not manage to catch a serial killer of prostitutes, a freelance investigative journalist from Tehran, Rahimi (Zahra Emir-Ebrahimi), shows up in the holy city of Mashad with the intention of cracking this long-running case.

This is the premise of Holy Spider, which is a fictional story inspired by the real-life story of the Iranian construction worker Saeed Hanaei (Mehdi Bajestani), who in 2001, was arrested for killing 16 prostitutes in Mashad and became a kind of folk hero for religious groups who idealized him for his moral crusade or holy mission of cleansing the city. This was exactly what inspired Danish-Iranian director Ali Abbasi to make a film about it.

“I think where it really became something else and [when it] became interesting for me was when a certain segment in the Iranian society and press and authorities start talking about this guy as some sort of selfless hero that has been sacrificing himself for the good of the society,” says director Ali Abbasi at the press conference for the film at the Cannes Film Festival, where it is presented in the main competition.

“Even starting that conversation, I think it was very interesting. And I think that’s where it became more than a story of some twisted guy killing women. That it became a story of that serial killer society that we’re talking about.”

Below the Radar

As a devout Shia Muslim who prays at the Imam Reza Shrine and is a veteran of the war between Iran and Iraq, Hanaei is a dedicated husband and family father of two at home. He has an adorable little daughter who he treats with love, a teenage son Ali (Mesbah Taleb), who admires him and a lovely wife Famita (Forouzan Jamshidnejad).

“At first it was quite a difficult choice for me to make whether I would be in this film or not,” says Iranian actor Bajestani. “I thought there was no reason why I should turn this down. And it had to be a profound acceptance in me. Once that I had accepted that, it was necessary for me to have this self-agreement in myself before being able to actually act and embody the character.”

Hanaei’s family is unaware of the atrocities that take place when they leave the family home to visit the grandparents. He brings the women home and kills them in the living room to later dump them somewhere in the vicinity and boast about it to a local reporter who does not seem to find it important to report this to the police.

“I was living in Iran when this was ongoing and I heard about this,” explains Abbasi, who moved to Sweden and eventually Denmark to go to film school and live there. “And in Iran, we were very unfortunate in a way, because unless there is a serial killing of a certain number, let’s say five or seven or up in those numbers, it’s not really news.”

Abassi points out that a serial killer on the loose would have created headline news in the UK, Spain or Japan, but that it was not even mentioned in the Iranian press. It was not on anyone’s radar until the tenth woman was killed.

“Then it blew up. I think it was a big deal, even if the state-controlled media, they didn’t really cover this as much. But still, I remember there was an atmosphere of anxiety and fear, especially in the city of Mashhad. And then it went on, and it became a national high-profile case when he was caught and that had its own implications.”

Women in Focus

The focus of the film is how it takes the female journalist Rahimi to solve the crime and the obstacles that she has to go through in order to do it. She has been fired from her job as she did not appreciate the advances made by her boss and finds herself having to deal with a misogynistic world on top of dealing with the challenges of being a freelance reporter.

“I channeled my personal life and my personal life, especially in Iran,” says actress Amir-Ebrahimi who plays Rahimi and no longer lives in Iran. “Because I was in trouble when I just left Iran. And I know how you deal with the government when you need just to solve a problem with the government. This is just horrible.”

We see all the obstacles Rahimi has to go through. She has problems getting a hotel room because she does not bring her husband. Strangers tell her to cover her hair and she is treated disrespectfully by the police – including the police chief Rostami (Sina Parvaneh). But she is determined to find out who killed the women and is willing to put herself in danger by pretending to be a prostitute in the very streets the killer was prowling.

“I remember I was just walking in the street, and somebody was touching me like this, or somebody wanted to just assault me because I was just a little bit beautiful maybe,” says the actress about relating to the women in the film. “And I had always these erotic comments. And I think women, Iranian women or maybe many other women around the world, we have kind of similar experiences as Rahimi has in this movie. So, I just try to somehow add all these understanding and experiences to this character and just develop it little by little in the story.”

In Holy Spider, our sympathy is with the women who are killed, and we learn how poverty has led them to the path they see as the only way of providing for themselves and their children. At the beginning of the film, we see how a tired and battered Somayeh (Alice Rahimi) prepares herself for the night after having kissed her child goodnight, and the harsh reality and danger of her work as she tries to cope as a single mother. We see how she ends up in the hands of the serial killer and how her life is mercilessly and violently taken away from her.

“We didn’t do the movie to highlight the women’s conditions in Iran,” says Abbasi firmly. “Is it limited to the Iranian society? I don’t think so. “