Watch the first clip from the film below Paolo Strippoli, who is Italy’s hottest young helmer of genre movies, is back at Venice Film Festival with “The Spiral.” The high-concept thriller stars Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as a demonic character called The Stranger, who entices a young mother played by Jasmine Trinca into forging a Faustian pact. At the film’s start, a woman named Anna suddenly shows up at her daughter’s Alice’s house during a thunderstorm saying she wants to tell her a dark truth about their family. She claims to have made a pact with The Stranger to save Alice’s leg after an accident 20 years earlier.
That pact “has triggered a domino effect causing terrible events over the years. Only Alice can help to put everything right. But at what price?” the synopsis says.
Besides Tedeschi and Trinca, “The Spiral” cast also comprises Romana Maggiora Vergano (“There’s Still Tomorrow”) and Adriano Giannini (“Supersex”). The film was lead produced by Rome-based Propaganda in tandem with France’s Kazak Productions. Strippoli made his directorial debut in 2021 with “A Classic Horror Story,” a hit Netflix Original film he co-directed with Roberto De Feo.
In 2022, he helmed his second feature, the psychological horror “Piove.” And in 2025, Strippoli’s third movie, “The Holy Boy” launched from Venice. Below, Strippoli speaks to Variety about working with his top-notch cast on “The Spiral” and reveals an exclusive clip from the film. Then, when I told this story to my co-screenwriter, Salvatore De Chirico, he said, “Let’s make it into a film.” It was born from my fear of not having control over things in life.
It’s a film about control, about how it’s impossible to determine our destiny. We live in a society, in a world that teaches us and pushes us to self-determination. But the truth is that self-determination is not always possible.
One of the themes is parenthood and a way of conceiving motherhood and parental love as control and ambition that is projected onto one’s children. Not that Anna Colonna or Walter Colonna, the parents in this family, are evil, They are certainly overbearing personalities, but they are not bad people. I have never seen them as people who don’t truly love their children.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
