L'ESTRANEA
Italy, France, Belgium
2026 | 115 min. | Fiction

On a stormy night in Rome, Anna arrives at her daughter Alice’s apartment with a devastating confession: their entire family history is built on a lie.
Twenty years earlier, after a horrific accident that nearly cost Alice her leg, Anna claims she made a pact with a mysterious stranger to save her.
But the miracle came at a price. What she believed was a single desperate bargain has in fact unleashed a spiraling chain reaction, a domino effect of increasingly dark events that have haunted their lives ever since.
Now, the stranger has come to collect. And Anna is convinced that only Alice can break the spiral and set things right. But at what cost?

Directed by: Paolo Strippoli
Written by: Paolo Strippoli, Salvatore de Chirico
Produced by: Marina Marzotto, Mattia Oddone, Paolo Del Brocco, Jean-Christophe Reymond, Joseph Rouschop, Eva Curia
Cinematography: Cristiano Di Nicola
Editing: Federico Palmerini
Production Design: Marcello Di Carlo, Sabina Cellitti
Costume Design: Susanna Mastroianni
Make-Up & Hair: Enza Lamparelli, Pablo Cabello, Olivier Afonso, Denise Boccacci, Andrea Leanza
Original Score: Robin (aka Rob) Coudert
Sound: Quentin Collette, Marc Bastien, Franco Piscopo
Visual Effects: Giuseppe Squillaci, Julien Vandevelde, Sander Jansens, Laureline Silan
Casting: Anna Pennella, Stefania Rodà
Cast: Jasmine Trinca (Anna), Adriano Giannini (Walter), Romana Maggiora Vergano (Alice), Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (the stranger)

Statement of the director:
I’m fascinated by the relationship between parents and children – every relationship between parent and child is a glimpse of the larger contemporary society, and I think you can tell any kind of story using the lens of this relationship. Also, in a Western conception, there’s the idea of living through your children, or controlling them, which is fascinating because of course children are their own people.

The film's structure vacillates between present and past, across four distinct chapeters. I wanted the viewer to experience this film as a spiral, and the chapters helped organize the spiral structure inside the story. We needed those four chapters because they emphasize each character, and this is the story of a family – mother, father, daughter, son. Every chapter focuses on a deal Anna, the mother, makes with the enigmatic character known as the stranger, and every chapter focuses on the consequences of the deals on specific family members. The very structure of the film is a spiral – every chapter is another loop of the spiral, and you can feel the loop getting smaller and tighter.

The Colonna family start as the perfect family. They are beautiful and they fit perfectly into the society around them, but their perfection comes at a price, which is constantly being in control of how they act and appear in the world. They fear losing that perfection. This particular time, near the turn of the century, was a period of economic and industrial growth in Italy, so the Colonnas, who run a successful retail operation, are the perfect people to represent what a city like Bari and its people aspired to be in 1999. Everyone likes them, because they are reassuring, and they come to represent that specific moment in time – the new millennium taking root in an old town. These are not bad people, but Anna in particular is fighting as much as she can to preserve the carefully cultivated perfection on display for the world to see.

Walter, the father, can be very harsh but breaks much more easily than Anna, who fights until the end to get what she wants. And while Walter’s style of parenthood is just as toxic as Anna’s, I try not to judge my characters – because this isn’t a toxicity that comes from them being mean people, they’re simply overbearing. It’s a reflection of what the society wants from them, and what they want for their children. Both parents want their children to fit into society in the same way they do as adults, but Anna is stronger than Walter, and more subtle in her aims.

I wrote Anna's role with Jasmine Trinca in mind because she’s a great actress, but there is a specific reason why I wanted her to play Anna, and it’s because the character is so ferocious. It’s hard to empathize with Anna sometimes, but Jasmine has a rare empathic quality to her acting – she has incredible emotional intelligence. When you talk to her, or watch her performances, you see this sweetness inside of her, and I wanted her to recreate that with Anna because I knew the audience wouldn’t see her as a mean or angry person – rather someone who had become a victim of herself, and her own patterns. Jasmine helped bring warmth and heart to Anna Colonna, even when she’s experiencing pain and suffering. Like mine, Jasmine’s approach was never to judge Anna. She put her emotional intelligence directly inside the character.

Anna’s big problem is that she thinks she has the power to make things real or not real just by accepting them, and while this is a smaller element inside the bigger story, it’s what she does throughout the entire story – she makes deals to reverse the effects of bad things that happen.

The camera work in the film reflects Anna's reality. I had only one guideline and I tried to apply this to each of the different chapters of the story even when the script comes to feel campy or violent; I wanted to film this movie in a very elegant way because when horror creeps into the Colonnas’s lives, she/they fight even harder to be elegant, beautiful, and perfect. Of course, this only results in the horror and violence that befalls them becoming even harsher. I wanted to create a clash between the elegance of the family and the violent, upsetting things that happen to them.

I also wanted the tone of the film to reflect how life really is: funny and cruel at the same time. There are highs and lows, victories and defeats, the sacred and profane. The Spiral is a story of conflict and contrasts, and the tone of the movie needed to reflect that. There’s a lot of darkness in the movie, and you want to laugh at the darkness sometimes, so it was a relief to settle on this tone.

I think I would have been lost if I didn’t have Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi in the role of the stranger. Once Valeria entered my mind, I knew she had to be the stranger, and I wrote the screenplay on spec specifically with her in mind. She can be quite funny as an actor while still exercising severity in her words and demeanor. She knows how to convey cruelty, but she’s also naturally elegant. She also knew how to nail the psychosexual demands of this character.

The common denominator which links my last three films is the theme of losing control, and how the impossibility of controlling our lives affects our mental health. Losing control terrifies me as a storyteller, and a human being. It also terrifies me as a director. We all have demons inside, and if those demons take over, it’s the end. This is why I like to
use the horror lens, or the genre lens, in my work, because I can give body to these demons, and make them real onscreen.

It’s a kind of exorcism.

Production:
Propaganda Italia
https://www.propaganda.it

World Sales:
Le Pacte
http://www.le-pacte.com