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‘Holy Spider’ Review: A Taut, True-Crime Procedural Tangled in the Wicked Web of Iranian Patriarchy

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variety.com

Jessica Kiang It is hard to watch the brutalization of women on screen, especially when you know it is a re-creation of an actual crime.

But it is harder still — rightly, valuably so — if you’ve been made to notice the way this woman’s lipstick is smeared over her cracked lips, if you’ve seen the old bruises that mottle that woman’s body beneath her chador, or watched her carefully stash her flats in a crinkled plastic bag as she switches into heels in a dingy bathroom.

Saeed Hanaei, the real-life serial killer reimagined in Ali Abbasi’s tense and convincing procedural, believed that God was behind his grand mission to rid his city of prostitutes.

But in “Holy Spider,” the devil is in those devastating details. Hanaei, here portrayed with brave understatement by affable Iranian actor Mehdi Bajestani, was a builder, a family man, a resident of Iran’s second-largest city Mashhad (a name that means “the place of martyrs”), a devout Shia Muslim and a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war.

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