It goes without saying that an Iranian genre film with a combative female heroine is something to be lauded, at any time, but especially now. The film is apparently based on real events, as an ex-soldier, driven by a desire to clean up the streets, starts murdering prostitutes in the holy city of Mashhad. Rahimi, a journalist from Tehran, comes to Mashhad and sets out to hunt down the killer, using herself as bait. As Mr Curry observed, it’s a film in the tradition of Seven, with the spirit of Fincher and before that Hollywood B-movies looming large. The film decides at one point to split its narrative between the killer and the journalist, which serves to diminish a certain amount of dramatic tension, and the denouement, when the killer picks up the journalist, actually occurs at the end of Act 2, with the last act examining the social and political implications of the case. Perhaps as a result of these choices, the film sometimes seems a little like a mash-up of varying intentions, neither genre nor social drama, although, who knowns, perhaps this is a good thing. The opening sequence, which builds to the murder of a prostitute, has an elemental power which the remainder never quite matches, in spite of some graphic murder scenes, but Holy Spider is another example of the rude health of the Iranian film industry in spite (or perhaps because of?) the constraints of the society it emerges from.
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