The Spiral

On a dark and stormy night, Alice (Romana Maggiora Vergano) is surprised to answer the door to her estranged mother Anna (Jasmine Trinca) who has a sinister story to spin. Twenty years earlier, when their family seemed idyllic, a tragedy befell Alice; one whose consequences were circumvented by a bargain struck between Anna and an enigmatic stranger. But the pact came with a terrible price, and Anna found herself increasingly entangled with her Faustian benefactor. At first dismissing her mother’s confession as a desperate excuse to explain the erosion of their relationship, each tragic revelation brings Alice closer to uncovering the true and shocking reason for her mother's visit.

Skilfully turning the screws on its audience in tandem with his besieged characters, Paolo Strippoli directs this riveting psychological chiller with assured style and an appealing classicism that recalls Rod Serling’s ingenious mapping of high-concept horror on paranoid morality plays in The Twilight Zone. Divided across four chapters, Strippoli and Salvatore de Chirico’s elegant script perversely ratchets each episode with discomforting confrontations of decidedly bourgeois anxieties, revealing a canny critique of the lengths people will go to combat an undesirable destiny, and who they’re willing to have shoulder the burden

Enveloped in a sumptuously photographed but pervasive pall of unblinking dread, The Spiral further distinguishes its cautionary tale del momento from other recent popular treatises on the unintended side effects of supernatural wish fulfillment with the wicked personification of its devilish dealer, formidably portrayed by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, whose icy calm and menacing stare will pervasively shudder the most steadfast soul.

PETER KUPLOWSKY

Content advisory: suicide, self-harm, explicit violence, accident trauma, coarse language, scenes of surgery, mature themes