The movie Holy Spider received seven minutes of standing ovation in Cannes Film Festival, lauded for “push[ing] envelope with nudity, sex and graphic strangling scenes.” The direction and the necessity of this push, however, remains vague.

In his interview with Variety, director Ali Abbasi maintained that Holy Spider is “at least one movie where women actually have bodies, where they don’t sleep with their headscarves on.” He considers his portrayal of the victims of Saeed Hanaei (played by Mehdi Bajestani) — the so-called Spider killer who lured prostitutes to his home and strangled them, hence the name — to be “a little piece of justice being played out” since “even when people condemn this [series of murders], they never mention those women.” Another way Abbasi has tried to distinguish his movie is by claiming it to be not about the serial-killer himself but a serial-killer society where “misogyny breeds through the habits of people.”

Meanwhile, some audience members couldn’t sit through the movie to witness or participate in the applause. And some, including a Guardian critic Charles Bramesco, found the movie a “hateful, reprehensible, atrocious motion picture that indulges in the thing it claims to denounce.”

The movie opens on a shot of a woman, the first of many prostitutes the movie exposes and disposes of, smoking in front of a mirror. The only thing distracting our eyes from her bare breasts is the bruises on her back. We are later privy to the sound of her last breaths rasping in her throat and to the sight of her rotten teeth, scorched by heroin consumption. She begs to be spared for her child as Hanaei tightens his grip, throttling her with her own scarf.

This trend continues with the rest of the Spider Killer’s victims, only one of whom gets a name. We see Henaei, and we see with Henaei, as he follows women, lies to women, bashes in a woman’s face, steps on a woman’s throat, drags a woman’s body down the stairs, and on and on.

In this movie, women do have bodies but ones that are consumed by drugs and men. And they sleep without their scarves on their heads because they are strangled with them.

The only woman who is not written in the movie just to be gratuitously killed is the female reporter, Rahimi. She arrives to the holy city of Mashhad to investigate the killings and finds herself at odds with a hotel clerk who is reluctant to rent her a room and tells her to cover her hair, a colonel who flirts with her and threatens to assault her, a cleric who condescends and conceals, and even with the Spider Killer himself.

Rahimi smokes, calls her mother, wears t-shirts and shorts, and paints her toe-nails. She has some speck of a backstory and some prospect for her future. The other women, the “real victims” whose “huge injustice” Abbasi sought to set right, are drug addicts who despair and die and disappear. Their bruised and bloody flesh is as fleshed out as they get.

Even the character of Rahimi, a competent and brave woman, doesn’t give the movie much credit since it fades in comparison to the character of Hanaei, the killer. He is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war who finds himself dissatisfied with his job as a mason while other soldiers were martyred or maimed or went missing. He wonders about his worth and if he is undeserving of a memorable life and an honorable death. Although his wife complains of his absence, we see him play with his daughter, tickling her into giggles. He takes his son riding on his motorbike — the same one he uses to bring home his victims. He watches movies. He loves and is loved, even if he does not always see it. We see him express a range of emotions so wide and well-written that, at times, his serial-killing habits recede into a mere hobby.

Although I have my apprehensions about the allocation of screentime in this movie, I don’t think its focus on Hanaei only diminishes its impact. The killer is revealed as soon as the movie begins and he is arrested halfway through the runtime. Here is where Abbasi’s attempt at showing a serial-killer society shines through.

The killer’s neighbors support him as he announces that his acts were not murders but cleanses. Shopkeepers give his family free goods and a veteran association provides them with material and moral support. People even take to the streets, protesting his arrest and declaring him innocent.

The last scene of the movie is of the killer’s son bragging of his late father’s achievements, entertaining the idea of taking up his mantle, and reenacting a murder on his younger sister. He puts his knee on her neck and then wraps her in a carpet as his father had done. He is ready to hunt.

In these moments, I thought back to the movie’s opening when the title appeared over an insectile shot of what appears to be Mashhad at night. The Spider Killer would have been nothing without its web, the holy city. The Holy Spider not just the Spider Killer but also the social state that left his victims vulnerable, and condoned, if not encouraged, violence against them. Abbasi’s understanding of social ills as structural problems and not the domain of an exceptional, sensational, individual actor should be valued, even if it is overshadowed by the movie’s (intentionally?) shocking first half.

All in all, Holy Spider, an Irani movie by Irani creators and cast, does push an envelope with its nudity, sex, and strangling scenes — a movement that should be viewed critically. But reducing the movie to these elements would be a disservice to a movie brimming with (at times too much) ambition and risk.