Good should be with spiders – Kommersant

The painting “Killer” Sacred Spider “” last year at the Cannes Film Festival, where it took place its world premiere, the prize for best actress. This film was directed by Ali Abbasi, a director of Iranian origin working in Denmark and Sweden. The way Asian reality and European mentality are combined in this picture, he considers the most interesting in it. Andrey Plakhov.

The bizarre mix of cultures also fascinated Abbasi’s previous work, At the Edge of the Worlds, which won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Makeup. It was not a realistic story, but a fascinatingly dark Scandinavian fairy tale, the fruit of an insane fantasy, albeit placed in an everyday modern environment. A key role in the plot was played by the image of a “different” creature, its role as a troll, which is rejected by a standardized society. This creature is connected with the natural and folklore world, and has only an indirect relation to ours. It turned out so unexpectedly and convincingly that Abbasi was connected to the filming of the prestigious American horror series The Last of Us about mutants who survived in the quarantine zone after a terrible virus.

Against this background, the new picture may seem almost docudrama. “Killer” Sacred Spider “” is based on a resonant episode of the Iranian criminal chronicle. In 2001, a maniac was arrested who terrorized Mashhad, the second largest city in the country, the largest religious center, a stronghold of “traditional values.” It receives millions of pilgrims every year, it has a record number of mosques, and at the same time it is called the “Mecca of the poor.” The victims of the criminal, whom he strangled with their own handkerchief and rolled into a carpet, were exclusively prostitutes thrown out by need on the panel. The Meshkhed strangler himself turned out to be a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, an exemplary family man who had little virtue in his own family and he set out to “cleanse the holy city” – to eradicate vice as such.

In Abbasi’s film, this character has something in common with the customs officer Tina from the film “On the Border of the Worlds” by one of its properties. She, standing at her workplace, smelled the smell of a drug addict or a pedophile with an animal scent. Saeed Hanai, the sacred killer spider (played by Mehdi Bejestani), also smells vice from afar and weaves a deadly web for sex workers who sell their bodies. This is where the similarity ends. The new film, much of which takes place in the pitch darkness of the night, is made under the clear influence of American film noir; remember in connection with her and the Korean “Memoirs of the murders” – the cult true-crime of the work of Pong Chun Ho. However, Abbasi himself defines his style as a “Nordic form of magical realism”, and, indeed, in some scenes he achieves a powerful effect, combining the sepulchral cold of the atmosphere and the hot latent neuroses, because it is obvious that the killer’s sadistic inclinations are the reverse side of his repressed sexual desires and fear of the “weaker sex”.

Compared to the previous film, Abbasi strengthens the social and political aspects. Firstly, it shows how the killer spider is perceived by others: he is the keeper of fundamentalist bonds, an exemplary citizen beyond suspicion. Serial murders of pariahs of society are perceived as God’s punishment, and only when the number of crimes begins to go off scale, the police, and even then not too zealously, get down to business. And during the investigation and trial, there are many hunters to justify and raise the defendant to the shield. Particularly impressive is the episode where the son and daughter of the killer proudly show how their dad choked the victims with his foot: the maniac’s work lives on and wins.

Secondly – and this is a decisive factor in the success of the film – the events are presented through the optics and commentary of the Tehran journalist Rahimi, who meticulously investigates the background of terror, constantly encountering resistance from the pillars of the patriarchy and even relatives of the murdered women. In the end, in order to neutralize the criminal, she decides to play the role of decoy for him. Zara Amir Ebrahimi came to this project as a casting director, but was so impressed with the image of the heroine that as a result she embodied it herself. And she was awarded the Cannes Film Festival as the best actress. For the global success of the film, the context turned out to be important – last year’s protests around the world against the arbitrariness of the Iranian authorities, the victims of which were freedom-loving women. The culmination was the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was detained by police for wearing the hijab incorrectly. Rahimi in the film also constantly feels sidelong glances due to the fact that she does not cover her hair with a scarf in the wrong way. Most importantly, she, like many Iranian women, has a heightened sense of justice, which has to be paid dearly, some even with their lives.

Of course, such a film could not be filmed in modern Iran, the creators did not receive permission to shoot in Turkey, so the director from Denmark had to move them to Jordan. Abbasi, who grew up in Tehran, had no difficulty in reproducing the authentic atmosphere of his homeland. And he did not deny himself the pleasure of including at the beginning of the picture, which shows how the sacred killer is operating, a television report on the September 11 attacks. Although this is an anachronism: in July 2001, Hanai had already been arrested and was in custody.