Cannes Review: Ali Abbasi’s ‘Holy Spider’

deadline.com:

Sometimes it hardly matters whether we know a story is based on truth or not. Watching Ali Abbasi’s thunderously damning Holy Spider, on the other hand, it drives a wedge into your mind knowing that a serial killer really did terrorize the Iranian holy city of Mashhad in the early 2000s, that he killed 16 street prostitutes, that there were police who conspired to help him escape and that there were people in Iran — a lot of people, he keeps assuring his family — who were on the murderer’s side.

He was doing God’s work.Swedish-Iranian director Ali Abbasi’s last film was the unclassifiable Border, a fable about outcasts and aliens in which an unfortunately grotesque Swedish customs official turns out to be a troll.

Border won the prize for the best film in Cannes sidebar section Un Certain Regard in 2018. Holy Spider is in the festival competition — nominally a step up from UCR’s ranks of newcomers and experimentalists — and is ostensibly a more conventional kind of film, a crime thriller in which a courageous, driven young female reporter (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi) unpacks the scandal nobody in power wants to touch.

Reduced to one line, it sounds like a rerun of a dozen thrillers. Holy Spider never feels like a safe genre choice, however.