Holy Spider

It's really too bad about Ali Abbasi's Holy Spider (عنکبوت مقدس). The premise is very interesting, and the underlying idea of the religious serial killer doing the god's work because the god wants people to behave a certain way and if you don't behave that way you deserve to die is certainly worth exploring. But this film doesn't quite know what it's doing, keeps changing focus, and finally wears out any welcome it had.

In the first place, Holy Spider begins by following one of the killer's victims. After he brutally murders her (something we see in gruesome detail), then he begins to alternate between the killer trying to hide the fact that he's a murderer from his family and a journalist attempting to stop him. This is not a bad premise, though it has its pitfalls – chief among which is the way the audience will naturally begin to root for the killer to escape simply because of how suspense works.

But after about an hour, the whole thing loses steam completely. It is unclear to Abbasi why he's showing these murders in such scopophilic detail. It's unclear why he's trying to understand the psychopath at the story's center. And it's unclear why the movie continues even after the killer is caught. The whole thing is a muddled mess made no less muddled by the fact that Abbasi clearly has a "message" for us all to take home with us. This was quite disappointing, especially because I was crazy about his film Border.