FF '26: The Spiral - Damned if you do

Italian director Paolo Strippoli creates a mean-spirited and windy thriller with The Spiral, which had its Texas premiere at Fantastic Fest this year just prior to its announcement as Italy’s Academy Awards entry. Anchored by a trio of strong performances from its lead actresses, the film puts a nice spin on the classic Faustian storyline but loses itself while upping the ante to near-ludicrous levels.

In present-day Rome, stressed but steely matriarch Anna (Jasmine Trinca) makes her way to divulge some long-buried family secrets to her adult daughter Alice (Romana Maggiora Vergano). The stage is ominously set with a thunderstorm and rain lashing at the windows as Anna sits Alice down for a story spanning two decades, split by Strippoli and co-writer Salvatore De Chirico into four chapters. 

For the first, we’re introduced to the whole family 20 years prior: Walter (Adriano Giannini), Anna’s husband, whose business is booming enough that he’s bankrolled their new, massive estate in Southern Italy; Tobia (Alessandro Carbonara), their son who already shows promise as a football player; and Alice (played as a child by Gabriella Telegrafo), who’s just booked a coveted Barilla commercial. Anna is contentedly haughty with her picture-perfect family and newfound prosperity, right up until a freak attack by the family dog lands Alice in the hospital. There, Anna encounters a woman credited as The Stranger (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), who offers Anna a choice to save Alice at the cost of another family member’s health.

Of course, no deal with the devil comes without downsides, and Anna finds herself forced into increasingly twisted ultimatums as the results of her choices leave her family worse and worse off. Strippoli and De Chirico don’t pull any punches across the next three chapters, showing the visceral and violent aftermath of The Stranger’s offers—ranging from child bullying to attempted suicide—and posing some truly cruel ethical dilemmas. 

The film is at its best when exploring the dynamics between Anna, The Stranger and Alice. The Stranger, who Bruni Tedeschi plays at first with a treacly sympathy and later with a very fun, maniacal cruelty, preys on Anna’s fears of disability, fatness, poverty and mental illness. As Anna tells her story throughout the film, the audience begins to see her as a less than reliable narrator; not the savior of her family but an egoist who thinks she can bend fate to her will in order to salvage appearances. It’s a layered and challenging character, well-matched by Trinca’s performance and deepened by the fraught mother-daughter relationship at the heart of the film. Anna loves Alice best—as evidenced by her first Sophie’s choice—but it’s a love that hinges on Alice meeting her exceptionally high standards. Vergano, meanwhile, brings Alice’s long-simmering anger to the forefront as the film spins out. 

It’s near the end that The Spiral’s balance of clever character study and gripping thrills begins to slip. Each chapter introduces ever-more intense moral quandaries, and the finale’s literal apocalyptic conditions feel unnecessarily scaled up, with Strippoli’s grandiose filmmaking—an abundance of overhead and wide-angle shots, camerawork that mimics spiraling and an overemphatic score—pushing rather than pulling the audience toward the story.

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