Araña sagrada (Holy Spider) - Reviews

...a clinical piece of filmmaking that starkly sets out the toxicity of zealotry fuelled by misogyny.

It goes beyond the denouement and the arrest, extending the murderer’s conceited theatre of cruelty to the police cell, the law courts and the media arena.

Selv om Ali Abbasi er ude i et større ærinde, bemestrer han også thrillerens nervepirrende spænding.

Abbasis mål er ikke at begå sensationalistisk true crime, men at skildre den kultur af kvindehad, som han mener har rodfæstet sig i Iran.

...en djupt ohygglig thriller som griper tag i en, skakar om en och får en att ifrågasätta mänskligheten.

...en bundhamrende nødvendig film for vores egen frelse.

...Ali Abbasi’s taut, enthralling crime drama “Holy Spider” resonates so strongly with current events in Iran.

The rapes and murders are gruesome, and we witness several. This is not a film for the squeamish or those easily triggered.

Ali Abbasi crafts a thriller ripped from the headlines in this story of 'The Spider Killer' who targeted female sex workers in Mashhad, Iran.

This crime thriller does a good job of building and keeping up tension and suspense right to the very end.

If the first half of the film shies away from the cheap thrills of its serial killer story, the pointed banality of its final chapters proves as horrifying this genre ever gets.