Holy Spider (2022)

Holy Spider is the kind of thriller that doesn’t just tighten the screws—it aims them straight at a society’s blind spots, turning a true-crime hunt into something urgent, furious, and hard to shake. Ali Abbasi stages Mashhad with a chilling, lived-in atmosphere, where every alleyway and office corridor feels complicit, and the tension builds not only from the killer’s pattern but from the everyday indifference surrounding it. Zar Amir Ebrahimi is riveting as the journalist Rahimi, pushing forward with intelligence and grit even as doors close in her face, while Mehdi Bajestani gives the story its most unsettling edge by embodying the banality behind monstrous certainty. It’s brutal and unflinching—there’s nudity, sex work, drug use, and graphic violence—so it’s not for everyone, but if you can handle its intensity, it’s a gripping, stylish film with real moral fire.

Holy Spider is clearly trying to be a grim, socially pointed crime thriller about how misogyny and hypocrisy can thrive in plain sight, and it doesn’t flinch from showing the ugliness. The problem is that its depiction of violence against sex workers can feel less like critique and more like endurance test, with scenes that some viewers will find exploitative or simply repellent. Structurally, it’s also more conventional than the premise suggests, so the investigation can lose suspense once the film shifts into a more procedural, message-forward mode. If you want a hard-edged performance piece and a bleak look at institutional indifference, it delivers; if you’re sensitive to graphic strangling, sexual violence-adjacent menace, or films that risk sensationalizing their subject, this is an easy skip.