There are films that leave the cinema with you, and then there are films that seem to follow you all the way back to the lagoon, slipping quietly into the narrow streets of Venice and waiting for you in the reflection of the water; Paolo Strippoli’s The Spiral (L’Estranea) belongs to the latter category, a dark, feverish and unexpectedly tender film that turns the familiar architecture of the Italian family into something uncanny, almost supernatural, and watching it in competition at Venice makes its central idea feel even more haunting: how much of our lives is really ours to control?

Strippoli’s fourth feature arrives at the Lido as a psychological thriller that gradually opens its doors to horror, but calling it simply a horror film would be to miss the strange pulse beating underneath it, because the real monster here is not necessarily the supernatural presence embodied by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, but the human desire to protect, possess and control the people we love.

At the centre of the story is Anna, played with extraordinary fragility and ferocity by Jasmine Trinca, a mother who has spent years believing that love means being able to shield her children from chance, pain and catastrophe, until an old pact with a mysterious stranger begins to reveal the terrible price of that belief; when Anna finally confronts her daughter Alice, played by Romana Maggiora Vergano, the past does not simply return; it erupts, dragging an apparently respectable family through memories, secrets and compromises that have been buried beneath the polished surface of a comfortable bourgeois existence.

Strippoli has spoken in Venice about the film growing out of his own fear of losing control, an anxiety that becomes the film’s invisible bloodstream, and he has also connected the story to his recurring fascination with rain, describing The Spiral as the concluding chapter of an informal “rain trilogy” alongside Piove and La valle dei sorrisi; it is a fitting image, because rain in this film is never merely weather, but an atmosphere, a pressure, something that slowly dissolves the walls separating memory from nightmare and love from obsession.

What makes the film particularly unsettling is the way Strippoli refuses to place evil safely outside the family home: the supernatural is there, certainly, but it enters a world already compromised by fear, expectations and the desperate conviction that a parent should somehow be able to negotiate with fate; in that sense, The Spiral becomes a story about the impossible bargain at the heart of parenthood, the fantasy that if we love someone enough we should be able to prevent anything terrible from happening to them.

Trinca understands this contradiction beautifully, giving Anna neither the easy absolution of the self-sacrificing mother nor the coldness of a conventional horror protagonist, but something much more uncomfortable: a woman whose love is genuine precisely because it is capable of becoming destructive. Speaking in Venice, Jasmine Trinca emphasized the importance of breaking away from the idealized image of maternal perfection, and that idea seems to reverberate through every gesture she makes on screen; her Anna is exhausted, frightened, proud and deeply human, and the film is strongest whenever it allows those contradictions to remain unresolved.

Opposite her, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi gives the title figure an extraordinary ambiguity: she can appear almost playful one moment and genuinely infernal the next, a creature who seems less interested in frightening people than in understanding exactly what they are willing to sacrifice; the actress has described her connection with the character as something unusually natural, and perhaps that is why the performance works so well; the menace never feels forced, because there is something almost ordinary about her presence, as though evil has simply learned how to dress elegantly and wait patiently for an invitation.

Adriano Giannini, meanwhile, gives the family’s masculine centre a restrained unease, embodying a man whose apparent solidity cannot survive the gradual revelation of what has been done in the name of keeping the family intact, while Maggiora Vergano brings Alice a different kind of vulnerability, the painful realization that discovering the truth about your parents also means discovering that the version of yourself they constructed for you may have been built on a lie; their relationship becomes the emotional core of the film, because beneath all the supernatural machinery there is an unmistakably intimate tragedy: what happens when a child realizes that the person who tried hardest to protect her was also one of the people who most profoundly wounded her?

The film’s structure mirrors that emotional disintegration, moving between a storm-bound present and the brighter memories of the family’s past, allowing sunlight and darkness to coexist until it becomes increasingly difficult to tell which is more frightening; this contrast between luminous memories and suffocating present-day spaces gives Cristiano Di Nicola’s cinematography a particularly expressive role, while the sound and visual effects gradually transform domestic unease into something approaching apocalyptic dread; the result is a film that can be loud, visceral and spectacular, yet is most disturbing when it becomes quiet.

There is also something distinctly Italian about the nightmare Strippoli constructs here: the family as sanctuary, the family as prison, the family as the place where affection and social expectation become impossible to separate; the film takes the polished image of respectability and keeps scratching at it until something rotten begins to emerge underneath, and that makes The Spiral feel less like an imported supernatural story than a contemporary Italian fairy tale for adults, one in which the price of keeping appearances can become monstrous; perhaps this is why the film felt so striking at Venice, where cinema so often arrives dressed in seriousness and prestige, only for Strippoli to let a genuine genre impulse crash through the doors of the competition.

The response at the premiere was reported as lasting around ten minutes, a reaction that suggests how strongly the film’s combination of horror, family drama and emotional excess landed with the Lido audience. Yet The Spiral is not frightening simply because it contains a supernatural bargain; it is frightening because the bargain makes emotional sense, because we understand why Anna accepts it, and because some part of us recognizes the temptation to believe that love can bargain with destiny.

Strippoli’s most compelling achievement is therefore not the creation of a monster, but the creation of a question that remains after the credits: if you could remove suffering from the life of someone you loved, what would you be willing to give up in exchange?

And if the answer were everything, would you still recognize the person you became?

Walking away from the film, the Venice evening seems suddenly altered: the wet stone, the dark water, the distant lights reflected across the lagoon,… and the title begins to sound less like a reference to one particular woman than to the sensation at the centre of the entire story: the feeling that something foreign has entered a familiar life, that the people we know best may contain rooms we have never entered, and that beneath every apparently safe home there might be a door we should never have opened.

The Spiral is imperfect, excessive and deliberately unsettling, but its ambition is precisely what makes it linger, because Strippoli does not use horror to escape reality: he uses it to look at reality more closely; and by the time the last image disappears, the stranger is no longer standing outside the family, because she has become part of it, part of us, the dark little voice whispering that perhaps control was always an illusion.