We don’t get a close enough look to see if the Devil actually wears Prada, but regardless, in Paolo Strippoli‘s new horror romp “The Spiral,” she’s very chicly turned out indeed: Cool, crisp and collected in a tightly belted camel trenchcoat, hair pristinely bobbed and lips perfectly rouged, wielding a cigarette like a laser pointer. As played with her signature husky-flutey delivery by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, this film’s Lucifer has seemingly stepped straight out of a film noir, though she hardly needs to use her femme fatale wiles to seduce well-to-do fashionista and mother-of-two Anna (Jasmine Trinca) — she just needs to prey, with casual malice, on any parent’s worst fears regarding their families, and if that also means asking Anna to choose between her children, so much the better. Step on our necks, mother Mephistopheles, and let the kids suffer the consequences.
A faintly absurd Faustian fable blown up to grand guignol proportions through Strippoli’s brash formal command of his favorite genre, “The Spiral” doesn’t add up to an awful lot, but the sum of its parts is flashily entertaining enough. It’s the fourth feature from the 33-year-old Italian horror specialist, and his first to be programmed in the main competition at Venice — a status upgrade that, given the new film’s lurid but quite superficial pleasures, might strike some as premature.
