Valeria Bruni Tedeschi Embraces Darkness: 'The Spiral' Unveiled at Venice

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi plays a demonic temptress in Paolo Strippoli's "The Spiral," a Faustian horror-thriller screening in competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival. The film, titled "L'estranea" in Italian and running 115 minutes, screened for press and industry at the Sala Darsena on the Lido, according to the Venice Biennale's official programme.

The role was written specifically for Bruni Tedeschi. She plays a figure known as The Stranger, a demonic character who lures a young mother, played by Jasmine Trinca, into a Faustian pact — a bargain in which a person trades their soul, or something equally precious, for a desperate favour (Variety).

The story turns on a mother-daughter relationship that spirals — the Venice Biennale describes the spiral as the recurring geometry at the heart of the film — out of control after a shocking revelation. A woman named Anna arrives at her daughter Alice's house during a thunderstorm and claims she struck a pact with The Stranger to save Alice's leg after an accident two decades earlier. The parents, Anna and Walter Colonna, are social climbers from Bari, Italy, at the end of the last century. The cast also includes Romana Maggiora Vergano and Adriano Giannini (Variety).

Strippoli co-wrote the screenplay with Salvatore De Chirico. The project began life as a novel Strippoli wanted to write; De Chirico suggested adapting it for the screen instead. The director is no stranger to Venice — his third feature, "The Holy Boy," launched at the festival in 2025. His earlier work includes the 2021 Netflix Original "A Classic Horror Story," co-directed with Roberto De Feo, and the 2022 psychological horror "Piove" (Variety).

Rome-based Propaganda produced the film in tandem with France's Kazak Productions, a cross-border partnership of the kind that European genre cinema increasingly relies on to reach international audiences (Variety).

For Strippoli, Venice is becoming familiar ground. Two consecutive festival appearances in two years place him firmly in the orbit of Italian genre film-makers the Lido has been eager to spotlight. The film screens in the Venezia 83 competition section, original Italian with English subtitles, alongside the festival's full 2026 lineup (Variety).