4 stars critical of the Telegraph for “Holy Spider”
Ali Abbasi ‘s film “Holy Spider” had its world premiere in the competition section of the 75th Cannes Film Festival.
Theater News Base: Ali Abbasi, an Iranian-Danish director who won the Look Award in 2018 for his film “Border”, has entered the Cannes Film Festival this year with his Persian-language film “Holy Spider”, a film co-produced by Denmark, Germany and Sweden. And France, in its first performance in the main competition section of the festival, was screened at the Grand Lumière Hall and was met with a positive response from critics.
The film will be screened five times at the Cannes Film Festival from May 22 to 25 (June 1 to June 4).
Filmed in Jordan, “Holy Spider” stars a series of Iranian actors, including Zahra Amir Ebrahimi, and tells the true story of Saeed Hanaei, a female serial killer in Mashhad who killed 16 women in 2000 and 2001. Finally, he was executed on April 17, 2002 in Mashhad.
Telegraph film critics Tim Robbie and Robert Colin, along with Anton Dolin of Russia’s Mendoza news site, gave four full stars to “Holy Spider” on the screen critics’ list, with Peter Bardshaw as the lead critic. The Guardian also awarded two stars to Ali Abbasi.
Critics of Le Monde and Time magazine each gave the star the lowest score for the crime film about a serial killer, and Michel Seaman of the French Positive Film Magazine gave the film an average score (two stars).
“Holy Spider” received a total score of 2.2 (out of 4) in the screen critics’ table at the Cannes Film Festival
Ali Abbasi, in a conversation with Variety about his film, says: “The idea of making it came to my mind when a serial killer was arrested and tried in Mashhad, but suddenly some people started encouraging this man as a hero.” “Some of Iran’s conservative media also encouraged him, and that was when I wondered why anyone thought he was a hero.”
Although “Holy Spider” is an Iranian film, it was not shot in Iran because it was not allowed to be shot in the country, and finally the film was shot in Jordan.
Abbasi described the theme of his film “Holy Spider” as “misogyny” and expressed hope that it would be one of the few Iranian films to have a relatively realistic view of society.