Holy Spider (Persian: عنکبوت مقدس, romanized: Ankabut-e moqaddas) is a 2022 Persian-language crime thriller film co-produced, co-written and directed by Ali Abbasi, starring Mehdi Bajestani and Zar Amir Ebrahimi.

Holy Spider was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival in May,[4] where Ebrahimi won the Best Actress Award for her performance.

The killer follows a pattern of picking up women on his motorcycle, taking them to an apartment and strangling them with their headscarves, before ultimately disposing of their corpses in desolate areas on the city's outskirts.

Later, Saeed is visited in his cell by his father-in-law Haji and his lawyer, who assure him that he will be spared the death sentence and that on the day of his execution, he will be secretly whisked away in a car.

Abbasi was a student in Tehran when the 2000–01 murders took place and was baffled by the conservative response that heralded Hanaei as a hero, and by how long it took for police to capture him.

"[8] Initial drafts followed the events more faithfully, but Abbasi eventually deviated from them and invented the character of a female journalist, as he felt the film should focus not only on the killer but on misogyny.

[9][8] Additionally, he found it difficult to research the events due to the passage of time and inaccessibility of certain documents as well as Hanaei's family, motivating him to shift to a narrative with more fictional elements.

Instead of making another movie about different ways a man can kill and mutilate women, we want to underline the complexity of the issue and the stakes on different sides, especially on behalf of the victims.

[9]The character Rahimi was based on a female journalist who was featured in Maziar Bahari's documentary discussing the case on camera and interviewing Hanaei.

The website's consensus reads: "Holy Spider foregoes subtlety in favor of a viscerally outraged dramatization inspired by appalling actual events.

The statement compared the film to The Satanic Verses and said it "has insulted the beliefs of millions of Muslims and the huge Shiite population of the world".

[23][24] On 1 June 2022, Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Mohammad Mehdi Esmaili said Iran "formally protested to the French government through the foreign ministry".

"[26] Amir Ebrahimi told CNN on 3 June 2022 that she had received approximately 200 threats since winning the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.