Said the Ripper – Weekend
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Ali Abbasi’s Sacred Spider Killer, a film about a brutal serial killer, was awarded Best Actress last spring at Cannes. The main question asked by the director, who emigrated from Iran to Sweden more than 20 years ago and has now made a film based on a true story that took place in his homeland, is not even who the real killer is, but what is dying – the best in us or the last hope.
September 2001, against the backdrop of terrible news from New York, the holy city of Mashhad sleeps and sees nightmares, where pilgrims from all over the Islamic world come to bow to the shadow of Imam Reza. Someone wants to survive in the midst of poverty, someone wants to become a martyr in the name of Allah. At night, women gather in dark squares. In order to earn a living, they are forced to sell the body, in order not to go crazy from this humiliation, they smoke opium, and then again get into wrecked cars with men to whom the law is not written: a woman, if she is lucky, can be a pet if if she did not find a master, then she is completely forbidden to be. The name of one of these men is Said. He is a war hero and the father of a family, and everything seems to be like that of people, only terrible thoughts exhaust the mind. It is not enough to survive, and it is impossible to live with dignity, so death should be sowed. Death is the only way to stay in eternity, and women who dishonor themselves and betray Allah are the most obvious target. He tells the press about his murders, methodically pointing out where the corpse is thrown, how to look for the remains. The people called Said the Spider, the fame of his atrocities creeps across Iran, and now the journalist Rahimi is sent from the capital for a detailed report. She will take an active part in the investigation, despite the collusion of the police with the imams – after all, the murder of prostitutes from a religious point of view is not necessarily a crime.
Ali Abbasi’s new film is based on real events and, of course, full of feminist pathos. The Sacred Spider participated in the competition at the Cannes Film Festival, exactly at the same moment another confrontation flared up in Iran between women trying to protect the specter of freedom, and a system that guards its inviolability, not wanting to give in a single strand of hair to the new time.
Formally, The Holy Spider is a classic thriller about a serial killer who needs to be discovered, caught and neutralized. Only here, from the first frames, we are told whodunit, because Said, stroking his foppish beard – out of satisfaction or excitement – symbolizes religious fundamentalism, which kills hundreds of women year after year. Faith is like a license to kill.
After “On the edge of the worlds” (2018), filmed in Sweden, a surreal drama about the main misfortune of mankind – the fear of another, someone who is not like you, and therefore immediately becomes a sworn enemy, Ali Abbasi decided to discard refined European metaphors and plunge into the hell of everyday life. In Iran, he spent the first twenty years of his life, over the next twenty nothing changed in his homeland, except that more countries in the world headed for Iran. While in Europe or in the States minorities have finally got a seat at the microphone and are pushing the human rights struggle by leaps and bounds, the East is still considered a delicate matter for a thousand geopolitical or frankly economic reasons. “Civilization” fenced itself off from the East with sanctions and remembers that people live and die there too, only when a viral hashtag appears on social networks or one of the Western stars on camera spoils Hollywood styling with a fleeting movement of scissors.
The “Holy Spider” is, first of all, full of doom – from this set of sophisms, long accepted by both good and evil as a consensus, there is no way out, and only downward development. To even greater tragedies, even more victims. Intervention and non-intervention equally discredited themselves. Sticky darkness covers any initiative in the frame. Returning by bus to Tehran, Rahimi is reviewing a video in which the son of the already executed Said boasts: many neighbors ask me to continue what my father started, many are proud of my father, he acted like a true martyr, serving the conscience of Allah. The triumph of justice lasted a couple of seconds, injustice is behind, and in the perspective of the millennium. Imam Reza, after whom the holy city of Mashhad is named, said: “Every person has to meet with what he is running from.” Ali Abbasi put this quote in the epigraph, hinting to the viewer – if only death were inevitable …
In theaters May 11
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