Venice Loses Its Mind Over 'The Spiral' — Italy's Best Horror Film in Years
The 2026 Venice International Film Festival has a new obsession, and it involves a trench-coat-wearing devil making very bad deals with Italian mothers.
The Spiral — or L'estranea in its native Italian — received a nine-minute standing ovation at its world premiere on September 7th, in what early reports are calling one of the warmest receptions of the competition year. In a festival known more for rewarding austere prestige dramas than Faustian horror films, that kind of response turns heads. And based on the reviews pouring in, it's completely earned.
The Devil's Bargain
The film follows Anna Colonna (Jasmine Trinca), a wealthy Italian mother from Bari who arrives unannounced at her adult daughter Alice's Rome apartment during a violent rainstorm. What she's there to confess will peel back twenty years of family tragedy — and introduce us to one of the most unsettling supernatural figures to hit cinema screens in recent memory.
Years earlier, when Alice was a child, a dog attack left her hospitalized and in danger of losing a leg. In the quiet of a hospital chapel, Anna encountered a strange woman (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) in a beige trench coat, cigarette perpetually in hand. The woman offered a deal: Alice's leg heals completely. In exchange, Anna's son Tobia suffers a transformation that quietly destroys his life.
Anna takes the deal. The Stranger keeps coming back.
What follows is a decades-long horror of accumulating consequences, structured in four chapters and an epilogue that alternate between rainy present-day Rome and the sun-drenched Bari summers where the damage was done. Each bargain the family makes tightens what the film calls "the spiral" — an elegant, merciless metaphor for what happens when people try to love their families by controlling them.
The Hollywood Reporter calls it "delectably nasty fun — a portrait of bourgeois smugness delivered with vicious satire." Deadline describes it as "a campy, fun Italian horror thriller worth watching." The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gave it four stars and called it "an uproarious edge-of-the-seat gripper."
Italy's New Horror Virtuoso
Writer-director Paolo Strippoli is quickly becoming one of the most important voices in European horror. The 33-year-old filmmaker from Corato, in the heel of Italy's boot, first announced himself internationally by co-directing A Classic Horror Story (2021) for Netflix, which won Best Direction at the Taormina Film Festival and helped put Italian genre cinema back on the world map.
His follow-up films have been even more ambitious. The Holy Boy (2025) premiered at Venice last year and won the Nastro d'Argento for Best Original Story. The Spiral is his Venice main competition debut — a massive step up and a clear statement that Strippoli isn't interested in making small, safe films.
Variety's Guy Lodge, who reviewed both Venice films back to back, describes Strippoli as "Italy's new horror virtuoso," and watching the way The Spiral uses its spiraling visual motif — wind, rain, objects appearing and reappearing — it's easy to see why. The film is shot by cinematographer Cristiano Di Nicola with exactly the kind of deep-focus woozy wide-angle menace the story demands, and scored by Robin Coudert (Maniac) with mounting dread.
Two Performances You Won't Forget
The Spiral gives its two leads everything they need to do career-best work.
Jasmine Trinca, one of Italy's most decorated actresses (winner of the Cannes Best Actress prize for Fortunata in 2017), plays Anna across two decades with what ION Cinema describes as "sublimely oblivious menace." She channels something in the vein of Anne Bancroft at her most predatory — a woman so convinced she is protecting her family that she cannot see she is destroying it.
But the performance everyone will be talking about belongs to Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. Best known internationally as Carla Bruni's sister and a veteran of French and Italian arthouse cinema (she received a Palme d'Or nomination as director for A Castle in Italy at Cannes), Bruni Tedeschi plays The Stranger with a kind of maximal, camp supernatural menace that has already generated comparison to the great screen devils. DMovies calls her character "elegant, camp, creepy, evil, sarcastic, hilarious, and completely bonkers." Deadline says she delivers a "divalicious turn as a trenchcoat-wearing femme fatale Satan."
She is, in short, everything you want from a horror movie villain in 2026.
What the Critics Say
Reviews are not unanimous — they rarely are for horror at Venice — but the shape of the response is genuinely exciting. The Guardian gave four stars. ION Cinema gave four stars. The Hollywood Reporter called it "a psychological thriller steeped in supernatural horror, dread, and vicious satire." DMovies called it a "dirty gem."
Screen Daily's Lee Marshall is more measured, noting the film grows "increasingly repetitive" as it accumulates flashbacks, and that the structure "promises more than it delivers." That honest mixed response is part of what makes this a real film festival discovery rather than a hype machine: the critical conversation around The Spiral is lively, contested, and engaged. Which is exactly what good horror should produce.
Early awards buzz pegs it as a strong contender for Italy's submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. It is also screening in Toronto's Midnight Madness section this week.
When Can You Watch It?
The Spiral opens in Italy through 01 Distribution on October 8, 2026. International distribution is handled by Le Pacte, and no US or UK theatrical deals have been announced yet. Given the Venice and TIFF reception, expect that to change fast.
Stream More Horror on Screamify
Visit www.screamify.com for nonstop horror entertainment.
Screamify features over 300 horror movies, from found footage classics to modern genre favorites. We are also producing original horror films, with micro horror content launching in 2026.
