8 minute read
NADIM CARLSEN DFF•HOLY SPIDER
This is a human story… with real monsters in it
WHEN DARKNESS
FALLS By Darek Kuźma
Nadim Carlsen DFF made Ali Abbasi’s retelling of a terrifying 2000-2001 killing spree in Iran into a gritty, stomach-churning experience that keeps you on the edge of your seat.
Women are strangled, their bodies dumped in the outskirts of the holy Iranian city of Mashhad, yet because they were sex workers the public is divided into those abhorred by the savage murders and those blatantly approving the so-called ‘Spider Killer’s’ street-cleansing. Holy Spider is a fictional version of what happened, envisioned and shot with a visual bravado and harsh social commentary. Thus we join the events when a female investigative journalist arrives to Mashhad only to observe her toilsome investigation being hindered by the police and Iran’s patriarchal society. The film also tracks the killer’s actions and follows the case through to its nailbiting and bitter conclusion.
It goes without saying that the events surrounding the faith-driven spree are one of the most shameful moments in the country’s modern history. Which is why Holy Spider was a laborious project that took the Danish-Iranian filmmaker years to make.
“Ali was going back and forth to Mashhad and extensively exploring it,” recalls Carlsen who met Abbasi at film school and shot his previous feature films, including the body-horror satire Border (2018). “I was with the project from its inception, and was taken aback by the brutality of the killings as well as the society’s reaction, but I couldn’t have been more fascinated by Ali’s idea of making a dark, sombre crime thriller with noir elements.”
Abbasi’s obsession with realism became a crucial factor in prepping the film. “Being an Iranian himself, he was all about authenticity, giving the audience a sense of time and place, of people and their attitudes, to emphasise the script’s harsh indictment of societal norms that led to the killings,” explains Carlsen.
“We were doubtful that we would ever get to shoot in Mashhad, but I had never been to Iran and I wanted to see and feel the city. We scouted there and I took photos of its streets, colours, texture and architecture. That proved invaluable when we were forced to change the entire concept and recreate the realistic feeling elsewhere.”
As Holy Spider was to depict the killer’s modus operandi in grim detail and invite the viewers to explore Mashhad’s nocturnal reality of ostracised women desperately trying to make a living, Abbasi was not given permission to shoot in Iran.
“It was a disappointment. Ali was willing to compromise a lot, to shoot with a smaller crew and cameras, but it just didn’t happen. We went to Turkey and Jordan, then chose Turkey as it was less expensive and we found perfect locations to stand-in for Iran,” Carlsen notes. “We had everything in place but then… we were denied permission to shoot.”
They had to prep again, this time in Jordan, mainly in the capital city of Amman. After additional months and losing their main actress, they finally shot Holy Spider over 30 days during April and May 2021.
“It was tough, but we stuck to our initial approach: realism, grittiness, darkness. We couldn’t do camera tests in Jordan, so we tested various set-ups, formats and lenses in Berlin, although we weren’t sure how much of the exteriors we could show. We liked the specific combination of ARRI Alexa Mini LF and Signature Primes, and we were particularly attracted to the fact that the large format sensor allowed us to shoot with wide-angled lenses without getting the lens distortion that you would normally get with S35mm sensor.”
It turned out that the pair could shoot more freely than anticipated, but the camera and lens combo proved ideal.
“The lenses performed really well, even wide open. I could shoot 1/3 T-stop at night-time and still get this modern, crisp look that we were after. The majority of the film was handheld, and the Mini LF’s size and powerful sensor enabled me to be mobile and shoot 1600ISO without worrying about the noise,” says Carlsen. “Because the streets were extremely bumpy, for some motorbike shots we used a Blackmagic Pocket camera mounted on the vehicle to get a more visceral, physical feel.”
The shocking mundanity of the Spider Killer’s methods – he picks up isolated sex workers on his motorbike, drives them to his home and strangles then with double-knotted headscarves – is intensified by the grisly darkness of the streets.
“The city was an additional character, dangerous, unpredictable, yet sort of sexy. We never chose pitchblack locations and enhanced them all in one way or another with realistic light sources, so that the danger was palpable and slightly enticing at the same time. I also had a LUT that showed everything on the monitor one stop darker to know how much further we could go without losing the details and shadows.”
When darkness falls, Mashhad turns into a neonhued beast of a city feeding on nocturnal sins. “It was very important to distinguish in every possible way between Mashhad at day, this innocent-looking city of whitewashed buildings, bleached-out yellows, clinically bland institutions, and Mashhad at night, a city reflecting the killer’s state of mind. Ali called it semi-seriously the ‘Islamic Las Vegas’, but the comparison was on-point. It has a main street, full of colours, cars, human noise, like the Strip, but if you turn into one of its numerous smaller, dark alleys, it gets spooky and gritty.”
This, and staying true to the time period of early
Images: Courtesy of Profile Pictures and One Two Films
2000s, informed the way Carlsen lit Holy Spider in close collaboration with his gaffer, Martin Lerche.
“In day scenes it was mostly about bouncing the daylight around or adding fluorescent tubes in office and institutional settings,” Carlsen explains. “We also added incandescent light bulbs to practicals and always tried to gel street lights so that they looked more like sodium lights. As a cinematographer, you have this instinct to make the places you shoot more cinematic, have the background darker than the skin tones, put attractive light on the actors’ faces. But here we didn’t do too much of that, it would be dishonest and not realistic. The offices have white walls, flat lighting, they don’t look particularly exciting which is in contrast to the night-time layer in the film.”
“For night exteriors we tried to match the street lights with ARRI Sky Panels or used a lot of coloured lights to get specific hues, like this deep green, or ‘Persian green’ as we called it, that Iran is full of. Deep greens, reds, cyans, strong saturated colours that make the exterior scenes realistic, dangerous and, well, alluring.”
For night interiors he used a mix of practical lights and LED sources. “Mostly ARRI Sky Panels and LiteGear LiteMats because you can squeeze them in anywhere. We also did some bulb replacements and had them remote-controlled to adjust and control the light quality and intensity.”
“We improvised a lot with the actors, even during the strangling scenes that were done on long, uninterrupted takes for the sake of immersion in the killer’s world and enhancing the sense of realism. We didn’t want to break up the rhythm of the shoot with various set-ups, so I lit for entire scenes. It might not have been 360-degrees, but it was pretty close.
“The idea was to shape the images while shooting and only do a bit of visual enhancement and VFX in post. Such as the scene when the killer goes to pray to the holy shrine of Imam Reza, which we shot entirely on bluescreen with some complex set-decorated elements designed by our amazing production designer Lina Nordqvist. But this was the only exception to the film’s realism.”
The DI process was conducted in Babelsberg at Rotor Film with colourist Petra Lisson.
“We wanted Holy Spider to be a film of various contrasts and didn’t feel the need to force any particular style on it,” says Carlsen. “We’d rather mix-and-match styles to specific scenes.”
They dubbed it ‘Persian noir’ and shaped their ideas through dozens of visual references. “We were sort of inspired, even emboldened, by the South Korean psychological thriller Burning (2018, dir. Lee ChangDong, DP Hong Kyung-Pyo). It creates its visual identity through clever mixing of different elements. There was also Son Of Saul (2015, dir. László Nemes, DP Mátyás Erdély HSC), for the way it isolates the main character in a frame and lets everything and everyone else play out-of-focus, making the experience more intense.”
Carlsen recalls referencing French photographer and film director Antoine d’Agata for his use of strong, almost sickening colours.
“He does these painterly photos of drug addicts, prostitutes, marginalised people, often naked. He’s a bit like photographic Francis Bacon. We also looked at pencil-drawn portraits of a certain Iranian artist who mixes sharp, modern feel with something sinister, and many more.”
One additional visual reference worth mentioning is 2003’s Maziar Bahari’s documentary And Along Came A Spider that details the Spider Killer’s spree. “Some of the scenes in Holy Spider, including the ending shot on a DV cam, were very much inspired by the documentary.”
“I’m very proud of Holy Spider. We couldn’t shoot it in Iran, but I believe we’ve succeeded in recreating the look and feel of the turn-of-the-century Mashhad. This is not a documentary, but we tried to keep it authentic. This is a human story, after all, even though there are real monsters in it,” Carlsen concludes.
Quite the perfect recap of an intense film that is going to leave some viewers emotionally-scarred in a way only cinema can.
1200W
Rated Power
2,700K-6,500K
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