Venice Premiere for Italian Horror ‘The Spiral’
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 …









