Paolo Strippoli’s L’estranea (The Spiral), presented in competition at the Venice Film Festival, begins with the face of a working woman’s young son, setting into motion the spiral that will define the film. It is the face of a child absorbing the pain of his mother’s humiliation.
In the middle of a party, Anna shouts at the woman who works for her, but rather than remaining on Anna, the camera follows the child’s reaction. Anxious and agitated, the boy transfers his distress over his mother’s humiliation onto the doll he is holding. His fingers repeatedly press into its body until, finally, he breaks off one of its arms.
At precisely this moment, the film’s circular movement begins: negative energy passes from Anna to the worker, from the mother’s suffering into the child’s face and body, and from the child’s hand into the broken arm of the doll.
The violence does not remain in that kitchen. It moves from human being to object, from object to animal, and from animal into human bodies. With every turn of the spiral, it changes form before finding its way back to Anna and her family.
The source of darkness in The Spiral is not, fundamentally, some demonic force. It begins with something entirely human: the moment when a person with power humiliates someone who has less of it. Anna may forget the incident soon afterward, but the child cannot forget the sight of his mother being degraded. A wound that is never processed does not simply disappear. It changes shape, travels through the world, and eventually finds another body in which to surface.
The children’s rhyme that repeatedly returns to Anna’s mind, and that she in turn teaches to her own children, carries this denial from one generation to the next: close your eyes and the wounds and pain will disappear.
The film uses the rhyme as more than a childhood memory. It becomes a method of education, a lesson in how not to confront suffering. Anna herself has learned since childhood that instead of looking directly at a wound, one can simply close one’s eyes and imagine that it no longer exists. But a wound does not disappear because no one looks at it. It remains in the darkness, takes root and eventually emerges through another person’s body or life. Anna passes this habit of denial to her children just as she passes on the rhyme.
Years later, the same boy whose mother was humiliated is among those who torment Anna’s son, Tobia. They climb onto his back, call him a “pig,” and force him to make pig noises. The sound is more than part of a cruel childhood game. It seems to recreate the feeling the boy experienced years earlier when he heard Anna shouting at his mother. A child who was powerless to respond while his mother was being humiliated now forces the son of the woman responsible to give voice to the suffering he himself once had to endure in silence.
The film turns that sound into an auditory motif. The pig-like noise returns later in Tobia’s repeated struggles for breath and in the strangled, rasping sound of his breathing under medical assistance in intensive care. What first appeared as mockery and violent play now emerges from his body at the boundary between life and death. Sound itself seems to acquire a memory. It passes from one mouth to another until it finally returns to Anna through the broken breathing of the victim.
The dog inherited along with Anna’s parents’ villa creates another link in this chain. The animal savagely injures Alice’s leg, putting her at risk of losing it. The “arm” broken from the doll in the first link of the chain now becomes the “leg” of a young girl. The energy remains the same; only the limb, the body and the victim have changed.
In the popular imagination, a dog attacking its owner inevitably evokes rabies, a disease capable of turning a domesticated, protective and loyal animal into an aggressive force. A similar transformation can be seen in Anna herself. A caring and protective mother, infected by her need for control and her inflated belief in her own power, becomes someone capable of harming the very children she wants to protect. Just as disease distorts the animal’s natural behavior, Anna’s obsessive desire to save her family pushes the instinct to care off its proper course. Affection becomes possession, protection becomes domination, and the sheltering mother becomes an attacking force.
Anna cannot accept imperfection, accident or helplessness. She is wealthy and privileged, a woman accustomed to making decisions. She has imagined a future for her daughter as an actress and one for her son in football. Gradually, her maternal love becomes entangled with ownership. She no longer merely wants to care for her children; she begins to believe that she has the right to possess their bodies, their futures and even their destinies.
The Spiral opens with a stressful airplane journey. The roar of the aircraft, Anna’s hands tightening around the armrests, and the jeweled double-headed snake ring on her finger, a sign of her wealth and status, immediately establish the two sides of her character: she is privileged and powerful, yet the moment control slips from her hands, she is consumed by anxiety.
The safety card in front of her reminds passengers that in an emergency they must put on their own oxygen masks before assisting a child. That image contains one of the film’s central questions: Can someone who has not saved herself truly save another person?
Anna unexpectedly arrives at her daughter’s home to reveal a truth she has kept from her for years. But Alice’s reaction does not correspond to the relationship Anna believes they have. Instead of longing or affection, the daughter’s face and body reveal fear, anger and a desire for distance. From the beginning, a gap opens between the mother’s idea of the family and the children’s experience of it. The family Anna remembers as happy and complete does not exist in quite the same way in her children’s memories.
Alice’s leg is the first thing Anna attempts to reclaim from fate. The mysterious woman reappears precisely when Anna’s ordinary power can no longer alter the consequences of an accident. She promises to save the girl’s leg, but in this film every rescue has a price. Damage is never erased; it is merely transferred from one body to another. Alice keeps her leg, but Tobia loses the possibility of becoming the footballer his family imagined he would be.
What happens to Tobia should not be reduced simply to Anna overfeeding him. His uncontrollable appetite and extreme weight gain can be understood as the bodily manifestation of the bargain and, at another level, as the reflection of an unconscious decision within the mother’s psyche. After Alice’s injury, the future once imagined for her is altered, while another possible future must be found. Somewhere deep within Anna, perhaps she cannot bear the idea that while her daughter’s path has been disrupted, her son should remain free to pursue his dream of football. Alice’s leg is saved, but Tobia loses the ability to use his own body to reach his dream.
At every turn of the spiral, saving one person creates a new wound in someone else’s life. Tobia’s physical condition, the father’s collapse, and the catastrophe that changes the lives of another mother and child are all links in the same chain. Each time, Anna persuades herself that by selecting a new victim she has paid the previous debt. In reality, every choice merely pushes the destructive energy beyond the family, allowing it eventually to return in another form.
Following his financial ruin, the father turns to alcohol. Unable to end his own life directly, he redirects violence away from his own body and toward the bodies of others. Driving while drunk destroys the lives of a mother and child: one is left in a coma, the other permanently dependent on a wheelchair.
Anna initially convinces herself that her husband’s death has settled the family’s debt, that the father’s sacrifice can serve as payment for saving Alice and Tobia. Emotionally, she does not even seem devastated by his death. It is almost as though depriving the children of their father is an acceptable price for restoring her own sense of order. This choice marks another stage in the revelation of Anna’s controlling nature. Yet before disappearing, the father has already created two more wounds in the world.
It is through this process that the meaning of “the stranger” becomes fully apparent. Anna wa
nts suffering removed from the people she loves, even if it must fall upon the body of someone she does not know. But the film demonstrates that being a stranger is never a permanent condition. When a daughter-in-law and a newborn child find themselves suspended between life and death, the border between intimate and stranger begins to collapse. Someone who could once be imagined as standing safely outside the family’s emotional circle may eventually become part of that same family.
Anna never changes fate; she merely alters the route along which the wound travels. What was spared from Alice’s body years earlier passes through several lives before returning to that same leg. Pain cannot be eliminated by selecting another victim, and no suffering can be permanently confined within the body of a “stranger.”
Whenever an event slips beyond Anna’s control, she runs to a church. These visits feel less like acts of faith than the flight of a person discovering that neither wealth nor determination nor social power is sufficient to command destiny. The universe cannot be held in one person’s hands and forced to obey her wishes. Anna turns toward the church when she is no longer able to impose her decisions upon the real world, as though retreating into its darkness might allow her to discover another means of continuing to control events.
Here lies one of the film’s central contradictions: Anna runs to the church in an attempt to control a force whose movement began with her own behavior.
She wants to change the consequences without returning to the origin. She wants to save the members of her family without recognizing that the first blow to this spring was struck by her own humiliation of another child’s mother.
The Stranger emerges from the space between Anna’s desires and the limits of human power. She can also be interpreted not simply as a character separate from Anna but as the embodiment of Anna’s controlling, decision-making psyche: the part of her that appears at moments of helplessness, chooses victims and promises that the world can still be forced to obey. In order to preserve an image of herself as a loving mother and savior, Anna externalizes the destructive part of her own personality and sees it in the form of another woman.
People who acquire power over the lives of others can reach a point where they no longer regard themselves as ordinary human beings. They begin to believe that they understand more than everyone else, that they possess special rights, and that they can make decisions in place of fate. Because Anna is a mother and because she loves her family, she grants herself exactly such a right. The terror of the film lies in that certainty: the belief that love can authorize one person to determine the value of another person’s life.
The spiral structure is not limited to the film’s story. The coiled shape of the chocolates Anna eats, the repetition of injured body parts, shifting identities and returning images extend the geometry of the spiral throughout the film’s visual design. The flood and storm become part of the same cycle. An energy that began with the humiliation of a human being and traveled through a child, a doll, an animal and the bodies of family members now seems to engulf nature itself. The external world becomes a reflection of the family’s concealed disorder.
In its use of repetition, disturbances of perception and unstable identity, The Spiral at moments recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. But where Hitchcock gives us a man who attempts to reconstruct a woman according to an image of his own desire, Strippoli gives us a mother who turns the bodies, professions and destinies of her children into personal projects. The other person ceases to be an autonomous human being and becomes instead an object to be saved, reconstructed and controlled.
Paolo Strippoli constructs this world suspended between reality, fantasy and delirium through the performances of Jasmine Trinca, Romana Maggiora Vergano, Adriano Giannini and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. As Anna, Trinca holds anxiety, tenderness, selfishness and the desire for power simultaneously within her body and gaze. The strength of her performance prevents us from reducing Anna either to a self-sacrificing mother or to a destructive woman.
Romana Maggiora Vergano, as Alice, carries a silence and anger whose meaning gradually becomes clear. Even her short hair can be read as a sign of suppressed anger and her desire to distance herself from the image her mother has constructed for her. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, meanwhile, gives Anna’s mysterious Stranger a quality suspended between double, spirit and internal force.
The film never turns Anna into a monster, and that is precisely what makes her character important. Her desire to save her children is understandable. Almost any parent, confronted with the suffering of a child, might for an instant wish that the pain could be transferred elsewhere. The tragedy begins when that wish is transformed into a presumed right to choose: when love gives someone permission to make decisions about the bodies, lives and deaths of others.
At the end, Alice destroys the physical body of Anna, her mother. The act is more than personal revenge. It is the reclamation of bodily autonomy from a mother who years earlier had entered into a bargain involving that body without her daughter’s consent. It is as though Alice has long been waiting for the opportunity to bring an end to the authority of a mother who confused love with ownership and rescue with control.
When Alice removes the spiral-shaped chocolate stuck to the sole of her foot, the gesture marks the end of Anna’s cycle of illusion and grandiosity. After destroying her mother’s physical body, Alice also separates the symbol of her controlling psyche from her own body. The spiral is removed from the very foot around which the first bargain had been made. It is as though the daughter, with her own hand, is finally freeing her body from a contract her mother entered into without her permission.
Then the flood comes. It washes over everything and carries it away, after which sunlight appears. The light does not mean that the past has been erased. Bodies still carry the memory of what has happened to them. But for the first time, the possibility emerges that the transmission of pain might stop. Unlike her mother, Alice does not choose another victim in order to save herself. She destroys the physical source of the control and removes the spiral from her own foot.
Perhaps psychotherapy, too, can be understood as such a moment: the moment when the tightly wound spring begins to loosen; when childhood wounds are brought out of hiding, pain is given a name, and its transmission to another person can finally be interrupted. It is neither an erasure of the past nor a battle against fate, but the recognition of a wound that, if left unseen, can pass from one human being to another and from one generation to the next.
The Spiral is ultimately about an act that may last only a few minutes for the powerful person who commits it, yet survive as a permanent wound in someone else. If that wound is neither recognized nor healed, it can move through people, animals, objects and even nature until one day it returns, wearing another face, to the place where it began.
Anna wanted to seize the entire universe in her hands in order to save her family. What she failed to understand was that the first force she needed to control had been created within her own behavior—and within herself.
