It’s a tense, atmospheric piece of film-making but it made me profoundly uncomfortable – and not, I should add, in a good way.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 22, 2023

An intensely stylish and appropriately troubling film, with stomach-churning murders and a pacy first half that’s reminiscent of David Fincher’s Zodiac.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 20, 2023

The film is an Iranian social history that looks, at first, like a serial killer movie... it is both.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 19, 2023

Trying to be objective here, but this will likely be a love/loathe prospect for many.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 18, 2023

A frustrating but fascinating film, made by an evidently talented filmmaker, which never quite manages to resolve the tensions between its apparent moral purpose and the formal flair with which it depicts events it purports to condemn.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 17, 2023

A striking film in any case, especially with what is going on in Iran right now... It's well constructed and allows us to see the greater society through this Iranian woman.

| Nov 30, 2022

At once exploitative and contemplative, thrilling and disgusting, the film makes a bloody mess of itself before coming close to solving its own case.

| Nov 15, 2022

A very effective thriller.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 10, 2022

The moral incoherence of “Holy Spider” arises precisely from... pretensions, which the movie ultimately can’t reconcile with its garden-variety bloodlust.

| Nov 4, 2022

A crisp, engrossing, and disturbing crime thriller.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 29, 2022

As a concept, it’s urgent and timely, but the execution is so muddled that the movie feels entirely defanged.

| Oct 29, 2022

Holy Spider's rendition of this grisly tale is powerful and precise, commendably lacking the sensationalistic tone of some serial killer movies.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 28, 2022

Yes, Saeed has been exposed to cruelly patriarchal mores, but the fetishistic way in which the killings unfold take us well past any social statement.

| Oct 27, 2022

Anyone who reads the news, anywhere in the world, will respond to these rote hypocrisies of misogyny with little other than jadedness.

| Oct 27, 2022

Holy Spider trickily manages to bridge the gap between social realism and exploitation cinema in a way that hints at how both are rooted in a similar place of gritty authenticity.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 9, 2022

Tight, taut and not one beat out of place, Holy Spider captivates from start to finish; it gets its claws in and refuses to let go.

| Aug 17, 2022

It seems almost too horrific to believe (and to watch) but it’s based on a true story...

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 31, 2022

Holy Spider is a dark, atmospheric character study of one of the most difficult humans to sympathise with.

| May 27, 2022

The whole film is pitched between a howl of rage and a gasp of disbelief.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 23, 2022

Holy Spider is an outraged, indignant and somewhat obvious work.

| May 23, 2022