The Spiral

For certain movies to have a desired impact, a viewer has to be of a certain – young – age and in a certain emotional or mental state. Think of being a high school student when you see Alejandro Amenabar’s Open Your Eyes for the first time – a gothic tale of the ever-lasting dream turning into an ever-lasting nightmare seems so deep, profound and wise that even Cameron Crowe could not ruin it by painting it in the colours of “October rust” and moving it into the realm of pop and soft rock music. For an older, more jaded and critical-minded viewer, it would not have the same magic and appeal.

Although it travels the festival circuit controlled by programmers, who are not teenagers, and runs for awards given out by the juries and polls composed of adult and accomplished professionals, Paolo Strippoli’s newest film, The Spiral, sports exactly the same vibe of well-acted “profoundness” and wisdom. Or maybe your humble reviewer is just too cold and cynical to let this modern-day Faustian fable with some biblical undertones into his heart. Time will tell…

It all starts in Rome on a very rainy evening. A mother named Anna (Jasmine Trinca) comes to visit her daughter Alice (Romana Maggiora Vergano), and the latter is not exactly happy to see the former barging into her humble apartment on the top floor of a crumbling building. Alice’s enthusiasm drops even further when Anna admits that she simply has to reveal some family secrets, which Alice sees as one of her mother’s tried-and-tested attention-grabbing “party tricks”.

The first of the flashbacks takes us back to Bari in the time of the Millennium Bug scare. Anna and her husband Walter (Adriano Giannini) lead a seemingly perfect upper-class life with their kids, Alice (Gabriella Telegrafo) and Tobia (Alessandro Carbonara): the father plays a crucial role in the upbringing of the football prodigy son, while the mother does all in her power to kick-start Alice’s acting career, while the kids are very fond of each other with almost no sibling rivalry. However, one incident involving the family dog biting Alice’s leg, which lands her in hospital, turns everything upside down.

The thing is that Alice was selected to star in a pasta commercial, and Anna’s ego could not afford her daughter losing her leg, the gig and the career prospect. While praying in the hospital chapel, she is approached by a mysterious, Mephisto-like woman (the star actress Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) who offers her a deal: Alice’s healthy leg for Tobia’s eating disorder. Once Anna accepts the initial deal, the following ones spiral out of control (hence the title), with higher sacrifices demanded for lower “rewards”. Can the spiral be broken? And, if yes, how?

Up until the end laced with cheap pseudo-biblical references, this horror-drama serves as a fun and thrilling ride that keeps its viewer involved with the central ethical dilemma constructed around the notion of “be careful what you wish for”. The reason for that lies in the maximalist approach from the filmmaker and his whole crew. Strippoli’s directing is sure-handed and stylish like in a cool turn-of-the-millennium Hollywood thriller, the production-, costume- and sound design are all lavish, and so is the acting, especially when Bruni Tedeschi is allowed to steal the show. One more factor of success should also be checking all the right boxes of nostalgia, from Liquido’s song Narcotic to the memory of the World Cup final of 2006.

Basically, it seems that Strippoli has cracked the “recipe” where, when and how much of the pay-off to insert to keep the viewer from questioning the ridiculousness of the very premise, and in that regard, the director shows a very solid command of genre film language. That should not come as a surprise, given he has been polishing the same craft of playing with psychology and morality in a horror-infused or at least slightly supernatural environment, achieving his biggest success so far with his previous title The Holy Boy.

However, what the film lacks and where the filmmaker drops the ball is the “big pay-off” in the end which feels almost mandatory for this kind of a movie. There were no ideal solutions to deal with the ethical downward spiral (pun intended!) the filmmaker created for himself, but he and his co-writer Salvatore de Chirico have chosen the worst possible: pretentious, illogical and with an open end that seems as a cop-out rather than an attempt to wrap things up somehow.

Nevertheless, as the modern fable, The Spiral can easily win over the more naive and less jaded viewers even within the ranks of the film professionals. Being selected as the Italian national candidate for Oscars is certainly a big step for Strippoli and his film, but one might wonder where Italian cinema is heading...

Reviewed on: 06 Nov 2026