Critics reviews

Holy Spider’s rendition of this grisly tale is powerful and precise, commendably lacking the sensationalistic tone of some serial killer movies... I was amazed at how authentic the film's vision of the country looks and feels—a vision bolstering a story that collides provocatively with the headlines now coming out of Iran.

If the intention is for audiences to recoil at not only the events depicted but the entrenched perspectives which allow for these sentiments, they foster, [Holy Spider] is certainly a success. Some may chalk this up to merely another excessive depiction of violence against women, particularly sex workers, but there’s also a subversive importance in such a viseral exercise taking place in a country in which the suppression of women has been normalized.

Holy Spider is true crime in the guise of an art-house film, which makes it unusually squirrelly in its attempts to be about something more while also delivering lurid spectacle... As a concept, it’s urgent and timely, but the execution is so muddled that the movie feels entirely defanged.

“Holy Spider” is a grisly-gruesome thriller parading as a moral tale... The irony at the heart of [the film] is fascinating and timely: How does a holy city not just foster but actively embolden prostitution, a drug trade and reckless slaughter? The film’s genre-movie stylings, however, flatten these sociopolitical questions into psychosexual spectacles.

[The murders] are so explicitly violent that Abbasi’s nobly stated goals start to reflect the depressing hypocrisy of his subject... Yes, Saeed has been exposed to cruelly patriarchal mores, but the fetishistic way in which the killings unfold take us well past any social statement.

Abbasi offered a brilliantly leftfield perspective on immigration and otherness with his 2018 debut Border, and his follow-up takes no prisoners in his critique of Iranian society’s built-in misogyny and fake piety

Throughout, Holy Spider trickily manages to bridge the gap between social realism and exploitation cinema in a way that hints at how both are rooted in a similar place of gritty authenticity.

By the third or fourth time we see Saeed at work, luring “corrupt women” into the apartment he shares with the pious young wife and children he’s safely stashed elsewhere for the night, the effect is less horrifying than numbing, a fine but crucial distinction that points towards a well-made film’s overall failure.

Overall it seems Abbasi got caught between the social righteousness dictates of the “message movie” and pure amorality of what, disturbingly so, often makes for great genre cinema.

What’s more terrifying than the depictions of misogynistic violence is how the film manages to portray the feeling of absolute ease with which the killer could move in the world, knowing that big and important parts of Iranian society support him on his mission “to clear the streets from sin,”

Despite the filmmaker’s attempts to discuss grand issues of morality and religion, sitting through extended courtroom discussions just isn’t very interesting. Holy Spider continues to progress in this way, a mix between tedium and an atmospheric thriller.

For the most part, “Holy Spider” is an engrossing thriller that succeeds at not losing steam when focusing on those genre elements... Its biggest failure, however, is boiling down a true story that is related to various issues — from class to the patriarchy to religion — in order to make a crowd-pleasing, conventional film.