Holy Spider (2022)
Directed by Ali Abbasi
Yes — Holy Spider is woke, scoring 60 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Ali Abbasi did not set out to make a film about a killer.
Consciousness Markers
The film is explicitly centered on the deep-rooted misogyny of Iranian society and the struggle of a woman challenging social stigma and patriarchal violence.
The central narrative is driven by a female journalist navigating a deeply patriarchal and hostile environment, giving significant agency to the female perspective.
As a fictionalized account of a true story, it offers a critical reinterpretation of a historical event, though it does not attempt to rewrite established facts.
The film addresses the bodies of sex workers, but the focus is on the violence and social stigma surrounding them, not on body acceptance or celebration.
While set in a specific cultural context, the film does not engage with modern concepts of race or racial identity politics.
The film explores social issues through narrative action and character conflict rather than through didactic monologues or explicit social commentary.
The critique is focused on social and religious extremism rather than economic structures or corporate power.
The film contains no discernible themes, characters, or subtext related to LGBTQ+ issues.
There is no thematic or plot relevance to environmentalism or climate change.
The killer is described as disturbed, but this is not framed through a modern lens of neurodivergence.
Why it received this score
Ali Abbasi did not set out to make a film about a killer. He set out to make a film about a society that produced one, and the distinction carries the whole enterprise. Holy Spider follows Saeed, a construction worker and war veteran who strangles sex workers in Mashhad and is quietly celebrated for it, and Arezoo, the journalist who travels from Tehran to catch him. The journalist is an invention, a deliberate insertion of a woman's gaze into a story that history recorded entirely through the eyes of men. She was fired for once reporting a superior's misconduct, and the police who should assist her prefer to remind her of it. The film hands her the investigation, the trap, the tape recorder, and the knife.
What the film understands, and what keeps it from becoming a tract, is that the misogyny on display belongs to no single madman. Saeed's neighbors, his in-laws, the courtroom crowd, the police officers, all treat the murdered women as refuse. The horror is distributed. Abbasi stages it with cold documentary patience and lets the audience reach the conclusion without a character stopping to announce it. There is no monologue explaining the patriarchy. The killings and the applause do the work.
The film resists easy classification in its refusal to file its grievances under any modern bureaucratic heading. The victims are drug-addicted street workers, and the film mourns them without turning their bodies into a platform. The evil here is theological and cultural, rooted in a specific place and decade, and it does not translate neatly into the vocabulary of contemporary identity. The final image, a teenage boy rehearsing his father's murders with his sister cast as the victim, lands as a diagnosis. It is a grim, accomplished piece of work, and it offers no comfort at all.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
A journalist descends into the dark underbelly of the Iranian holy city of Mashhad as she investigates the serial killings of sex workers by the so called "Spider Killer", who believes he is cleansing the streets of sinners.
Questions about Holy Spider
Is Holy Spider woke?
Yes — Holy Spider is woke, scoring 60 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Woke.
What makes Holy Spider woke?
2 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Feminist Agenda (90) and Representation Casting (75). On Feminist Agenda: The film is explicitly centered on the deep-rooted misogyny of Iranian society and the struggle of a woman challenging social stigma and patriarchal violence.
How does Holy Spider compare to other 2022 movies?
It ranks #12 of the 223 films from 2022 we've scored; their average is 22. The wokest is Bros (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.