The Spiral

There is a reason why the international title of L’estranea, Paolo Strippoli’s new film presented in competition at the Venice Film Festival, perhaps appears more revealing than the Italian one: The Spiral.

Because the spiral is precisely the form that destiny takes in the film: an apparently circular movement from which there is no escape, a geometry of inevitability in which every attempt to evade suffering ends up leading us exactly back to the suffering we wanted to avoid.

And yet L’estranea is by no means a random title either. Because for almost the entire film we are forced to wonder who this stranger really is. A woman, a demonic presence, a supernatural force, the personification of evil, or, more radically, life itself, when it ceases to coincide with the reassuring idea we have of it.

And it is precisely here that L’estranea becomes, at least in its intentions, something more than a supernatural thriller.

Anna performs the most human and most terrible act imaginable: she wants to prevent life from taking its course. She wants to spare her daughter death, pain, chance, loss. She wants to replace the unpredictability of destiny with a choice. But every choice made against destiny produces another destiny.

This is precisely the conceptual core identified by Strippoli himself in his director’s notes: human beings nourish themselves on the illusion that they can exercise real control over their existence and their destiny.

The Stranger could therefore be death. It could be chance. It could be guilt. It could be evil.

But it could also simply be life in its most indifferent and cruel form.

Because life has no morality. It does not distribute suffering according to any logic of merit. It does not respect the order we impose upon events. It can grant a birth and immediately afterwards impose a death; it can give happiness at the very moment it prepares loss; it can place the child she loves most in a mother’s hands while simultaneously reminding her that this child does not belong to her.

Tragedy arises precisely from this impossibility of possessing what we love.

And L’estranea attempts to construct a great metaphor of the family as the place in which this truth is continually repressed. An apparently protected bourgeois family progressively becomes the theatre of a devastation that seems to have no end: the film accumulates tragedy upon tragedy, guilt upon guilt, loss upon loss, until it transforms the family story into a sort of metaphysical machine of horror.

It is a powerful idea. Perhaps even too powerful for the film that contains it.

Because Strippoli never seems to trust his own idea. And so he multiplies it, emphasizes it, underlines it, exacerbates it. Where silence would be enough, a sigh arrives. Where a gesture would suffice, an event arrives. Where it would be necessary to allow the pain to settle slowly within the spectator, the film adds another tragedy, another revelation, another twist, another disaster.

The result is a baroque, redundant, deliberately over-the-top film.

There is almost never any measure.

The family should be the place where tragedy progressively penetrates normality; here, instead, it seems that tragedy is continually forced to put itself on display. Every emotion is turned up to maximum volume, every event seems to demand an immediate reaction from the spectator, every passage claims to be definitive.

And so what should be a spiral sometimes becomes a compulsion toward excess.

The film wants to represent the accumulation of evil, but ends up accumulating its own language as well. It wants to show us the impossibility of escaping suffering, but makes it difficult even to breathe within the narrative.

It is as though Strippoli were afraid that one tragedy might not be tragic enough unless another immediately follows.

And here the principal limitation of L’estranea emerges: not the weakness of the idea, but its inability to stop.

Horror cinema, especially when it aspires to a theoretical dimension, needs an empty space. The uncanny often arises from what is not shown, from the interval between two events, from what remains suspended. Strippoli, instead, tends to saturate that space. Pain is continually verbalized, displayed, relaunched.

And when everything is terrible, in the end, paradoxically, nothing can truly be terrible anymore.

Even death, which should represent the absolute limit of human experience, is absorbed into such a dense succession of catastrophes that it progressively loses its capacity to wound.

This is the paradox of a film that wants to speak about the cruelty of life and that, in doing so, ends up becoming cruel itself toward the spectator.

Anna does not accept the limit. And the moment she tries to erase it, she transforms love into control, protection into possession, sacrifice into debt. Motherhood thus becomes a form of hybris: the human attempt to replace destiny.

This is where the Faustian reference indicated by Strippoli acquires meaning.

Like Faust, the family accepts an exchange in the hope of obtaining what cannot be obtained for free: time, salvation, happiness, life. But every contract with what we cannot control already contains its own clause of destruction.

One must therefore ask who the real monster truly is: the Stranger, or the one who, out of love, is willing to pay any price rather than accept life.

And this is where the film could have been truly unsettling.

Because its most ferocious intuition does not concern the supernatural: it concerns our inability to accept that life is, quite simply, ungovernable.

Life is not fair. It is not unfair either. It is indifferent.

And perhaps the Stranger is precisely this indifference that bursts into our home, sits down at our table, looks at our children and reminds us that nothing we love has ever been promised to us forever. In this sense, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi is perfect.

Not only because she possesses that singular ability to move simultaneously through the grotesque and the tragic, the uncanny and the ridiculous, but because she seems to belong to another dimension than the other characters. There is something ontologically alien in her presence: she is not simply a woman who enters the story, but a crack through which something the family had tried to keep out enters.

Everything else, however, often appears excessively constructed.

The problem is that L’estranea seems constantly intent on proving how tragic what it is telling us is. And tragedy, instead, needs to prove nothing.

Authentic tragedy arrives when it can no longer be avoided and, above all, when it does not need to be shouted.

Strippoli constructs a family like a machine destined to plunge into the abyss. But in doing so he fills every cog with symbols, twists, suffering, revelations, sighs, bodies, deaths, traumas. It is a kind of baroque of anguish, in which excess progressively becomes the very signature of the narrative.

And this is a pity, because beneath this overloaded surface lies a much more radical film.

A film about motherhood as an impossible promise of salvation, about the guilt of those who survive, about the fear of losing what we love, about the illusion that we can bargain with destiny.

And above all, a film about the most scandalous thing existence forces us to accept: we are not at all masters of life.

Perhaps this is why The Spiral is a more precise title.

Because the spiral is not merely that of events. It is the very structure of existence: we believe we are moving forward, choosing, correcting, protecting, beginning again; and yet we continually return to the same point, to the same question that cannot be resolved.

L’estranea has the merit of posing a series of questions. But it also has the flaw of not knowing how to stop after having posed them.

And so the film that seeks to tell the unbearable cruelty of existence ends up, at times, becoming unbearable itself.

A spiral, precisely: intriguing in its idea, dizzying in its intentions, but too often a prisoner of its own excess.

There is also a further ambiguity, perhaps the most interesting one, which the film preserves until its final revelation and which it is best not to make explicit. Because the Stranger is certainly, on a symbolic level, life itself: that force alien to our will that bursts into existence, gives and takes away, creates and destroys, without ever asking permission. But it is also something else, something that throughout the film remains progressively perceptible and that only at the very end is declared with absolute clarity. The revelation, however, does not truly arrive like a sudden rupture: the film prepares it so insistently that, when it finally makes it explicit, the spectator has already understood where that spiral was leading. And perhaps this is precisely one of its ambiguities: what should constitute the great final unveiling is, in reality, a truth that has allowed itself to be glimpsed much earlier, like a shadow already present within every event. The Stranger, therefore, is not merely something that enters the family from outside: it is something that was already there, hidden within the very structure of their existence, as if the uncanny were not an intrusion into normality, but the truth of normality finally brought to light.