Holy Spider

The 2022 Iranian-French movie ‘Holy Spider’ was a treat at multiple levels. The movie is based on a real-life serial killer who murdered sixteen women in the late 90s in the city of Mashhad, Iran. The pull of world cinema is that it immerses you in geographies and historical periods that create a vivid impression, all while telling stories that are so universal to the human experience.

Mashhad is Iran’s holiest city and the site of the tomb of the eighth Shia Imam. The Imam Reza shrine is believed to be the largest mosque complex in the world. Harun-al-Rashid, the Abbasid Caliph, in whose court a portion of the One Thousand and One Nights, is also buried in the same complex.

Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the leading woman in the movie, won the Best Actress award at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, for her role. Her back story is also a fascinating one. In 2006, a sex tape featuring her got leaked on the internet. She was sentenced to prison and ninety-nine lashes. However, she managed to flee the country and has been residing in Paris since then as a French citizen. According to her, the Iranian government set about finding every man with whom she had shaken hands or been photographed! The movie showed her fight against the Iranian theocratic bureaucracy and the parallels between her real and reel life were so evident. The graphic violence and nudity were also something that I wasn’t prepared to expect in a movie set in conservative Iran.