Tina Kakadelis
Paolo Strippoli’s The Spiral comes to the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival after a nine-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. At TIFF, The Spiral screen sas a Midnight Madness selection. This program takes place each night at 11:59 p.m. in the rumored-to-be-haunted Royal Alexandra Theater and always promises something spectacularly unique. Audiences are raucous and want to be taken on an insane, usually bloody, journey. Strippoli’s The Spiral gives them exactly what they’re craving: blood, Faustian bargains, guts, and gore galore.
The main promotional image used for The Spiral is a staged snapshot of a family in front of a palatial estate. A man, Walter (Adriano Giannini), stands proudly in the middle with his arms around his wife, Anna (Jasmine Trinca), son, Tobia (Andrea Genovese), and daughter, Alice (Romana Maggiora Vergano). They’re living luxuriously, a perfect, upper-class family with no problems money cannot solve. That is, of course, until Alice is attacked by the family dog. The bite is bad enough that her leg will likely have to be amputated. Anna finds solace in the hospital chapel, where The Stranger (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) approaches her. This mysterious woman tells Anna she can save Alice’s leg, but something must be taken in return. Thus begins a downward spiral of increasingly dramatic choices made by Anna in an attempt to save her family’s perfect image.
The film is divided into four chapters and is presented in a somewhat non-linear fashion. In the present day, Anna has shown up at Alice’s apartment on a dark and stormy night to tell her that everything Alice was told about the family was a lie. Alice is skeptical, but as her mom continues to weave this unsettling tale, she can’t help but start to believe. The back-and-forth between storylines is compelling for the most part, but begins to feel a little tedious as the film goes on. After the dog bite, more trouble finds the family because of Anna’s deal with The Stranger, all of which could have been avoided had Anna let life unfold as it would.
Each agreement Anna makes with The Stranger is in an attempt to maintain the image she had so carefully created for her family. In order for her daughter’s leg to be saved, she allows her son to be cursed with an insatiable appetite and an inability to lose weight. Tobia’s weight gain becomes an uncomfortable joke that takes a lot of the thrill from the movie. The Spiral is about those who have everything still trying to get more, but by making Tobia the butt of the joke comes across as mean-spirited in the wrong direction. Everything we’ve seen of Tobia in the film indicates a kind son who loves his sister. Sure, it’s his mother’s obsession with image that’s supposed to be what the audience is enjoying, but Tobia is bearing the violence and pain of his mother’s choice. He’s bullied relentlessly by kids at school and his own father is disgusted by him.
A certain amount of pleasure is derived from seeing someone get what’s owed to them, but The Spiral doesn’t fully allow for that moment of release. When the movie begins and The Stranger is introduced, there’s a sense of excitement. A thrill at seeing how The Spiral could continue to twist the screw in new and exciting ways. As The Stranger, Bruni Tedeschi chews the scenery. She feasts on her darkly comedic role as a Mephistopheles stand-in. The Stranger is always present in moments of desperation, a brown trenchcoat wrapped around her body, a cigarette between her fingers, and a smirk dancing on her lips. She is deliciously twisted, but it’s not enough to save The Spiral in terms of creating what’s billed as a contorted morality play. In fact, The Spiral doesn’t feel like a morality play at all because it’s not ethics that are being tested. It’s merely the outward perception of one wealthy family that is at stake. Rich, lush cinematography can’t save The Spiral from its lack of bite.
