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Paolo Strippoli's 'The Spiral' Takes Center Stage at Venice Film Festival
Confirmed
In Short: Paolo Strippoli's horror-thriller 'The Spiral' premiered at the Venice Film Festival, earning a standing ovation and securing Strippoli's status as a horror auteur.
The film's narrative is compared to Saki's "The Monkey's Paw" and Paolo Sorrentino's "The Great Beauty," blending elements of both in a horror-thriller format. However, Variety notes that the film's themes, while universal, are not as layered or probing as Strippoli's previous work, "The Holy Boy." The film's inclusion in the main competition rather than a sidebar has raised questions about its selection, with some suggesting it might be a mea culpa for the festival.
The Spiral's reception at the Venice Film Festival was overwhelmingly positive, with the hometown crowd giving the film a warm and enthusiastic standing ovation. The film's success at the premiere suggests it may have a strong chance of crossing over into the international elevated-genre market. Following its success at Venice, The Spiral will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival in the popular Midnight Madness section.
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- But instead of lecturing us about the parlous state of the world today, Strippoli is happy to give us a grand guignol morality play that tells us not so much that we’re doomed but reminds us that it’s the things that we might yet do that may throw our lives off-track.
- There will be people wondering why Paolo Strippoli’s unashamedly commercial horror-thriller The Spiral is in Competition and not in one of the festival’s many increasingly hard-to-navigate sidebars.
- A more grounded mix of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty and Saki’s short horror story The Monkey’s Paw, The Spiral is a loud and very unsubtle piece of work that is surprisingly universal in its themes.
- While praying in what should be a simple hospital chapel but seemingly designed with more than half an eye on Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, Anna is met by a stranger ( Valeria Bruni Tedeschi ), who updates her on Alice’s condition: She is about to lose a leg, and that, she intimates, is the best-case scenario, since the surgeons in charge are inexperienced.
- Outside the window, a none-too-encouraging cyclone is forming in the clouds: the first of several spirals in the film’s image system, which, like many passing details in “The Spiral,” look cool and unnerving without leading anywhere in particular.
- The belabored flashback structure saps some tension from the enterprise, while Anna’s dreadful secret (revealed rather early in proceedings) doesn’t really build in physical, moral or spiritual resonance, leaving it to Strippoli’s enjoyably vulgar, pedal-to-the-metal aesthetic to gee up the film’s narrative sputtering engine.
- “The Spiral” arrives hot on the heels of Strippoli’s third feature “The Holy Boy,” a wickedly clever, creepy tale of small-town trauma, terror and faith that was a standout of Venice’s out-of-competition sidebar a year ago, and is an altogether more layered, probing and frankly frightening film than this one.
- Perhaps this year’s selection is the festival’s mea culpa ; perhaps the star presence of veteran Euro-arthouse queen Bruni Tedeschi makes all the difference.