The Spiral review – Valeria Bruni Tedeschi is hilarious as a demon cutting a deal with a vain matriarch
Venice film festival: Tedeschi gives a career best performance as the mysterious stranger who visits a wealthy Italian family to prey on their pampered weaknessesEveryone in the movie business has...
By Peter Bradshaw in Venice · The Guardian Culture
Venice film festival: Tedeschi gives a career best performance as the mysterious stranger who visits a wealthy Italian family to prey on their pampered weaknesses Everyone in the movie business has earnestly learned to call film-makers “storytellers”, despite the fact that film-makers don’t necessarily have to deliver conventional narrative and that so many of them are in any case no good at the old-fashioned business of storytelling. But this last point certainly doesn’t apply to Italian director Paolo Strippoli who has brought to Venice an uproarious edge-of-the-seat gripper in which Valeria Bruni Tedeschi gives us the funniest performance of the festival and the best of her career. It’s a satirical nightmare about a wealthy woman’s Faustian bargain, like one of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected – as elegantly designed and beautifully shot as anything by Paolo Sorrentino and with smart, subversive things to say about body image and body fascism and about a cosseted, self-involved Italian matriarch who eternally congratulates herself on sacrificing herself – or wanting to sacrifice herself – for her children. At the centre of this bizarre drama is Anna (superbly played by Jasmine Trinca) who is complacently marred to wealthy alpha-male Bari businessman Walter (Adriano Giannini): they have two children: Alice (Romana Maggiora Vergone) and Tobia (Andrea Genovese). Each family member gets a chapter. At a spectacular party at their gorgeous home, whose clear purpose is to make friends and neighbours jealous, a terrible accident happens, just after the children discover an ominous spiral of ants in the grass. While praying desperately for a miracle, Anna is visited by “ L’estranea ” of the film’s Italian title, the mysterious stranger hilariously played by Tedeschi, who appears to know all about this rich, picture-perfect family and offers to solve their problems. But she wants something in return, a sadistic deal that cuts to the heart of both parents’ selfishness.…