The Venice Film Festival has a new guilty pleasure.
The hometown crowd went wild Monday night for the world premiere of The Spiral, a campy, fun Italian horror thriller from director Paolo Strippoli (The Holy Boy, A Classic Horror Story).
Jasmine Trinca (Saint Laurent, The Caiman) stars as Anna, a controlling mother who makes a deal with the devil, in the form of a trench coat-wearing, chain-smoking Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, to save her daughter Alice (Romana Maggiora Vergano) after a gruesome accident. But the agreement sets off a, you guessed it, spiral of macabre events that will end up tearing the family apart. Adriano Giannini plays Anna’s wealthy alpha-male businessman husband, Walter. Andrea Genovese plays their son Tobia.
The twisty genre film, which dips into Grand Guignol territory, with plenty of OTT performances — led by Tedeschi’s glorious turn — may be an outsider for the Golden Lion, but it definitely played for the Venice audience, which gave it a warm and enthusiastic standing ovation, with the director and cast coaxing the crowd to keep clapping past the 9-minute mark.
Whether that will be enough to convince the Venice jury, headed by The Bride! director Maggie Gyllenhaal, remains to be seen. But at a Venice where fun has been in short supply, The Sprial, came as a welcome palate cleanser.
