Italy's Oscar entry is a horror film, and critics split over its devil

Paolo Strippoli's horror thriller L'estranea (The Spiral abroad), Italy's entry for the 2027 International Feature Oscar, opens in Italian cinemas on October 8, 2026. An expert committee chose it on September 23, 2026 from 21 titles, after a Venice premiere in competition that brought it no jury prize.

Twenty-one candidates, one genre film

The choice was made by a committee that the Italian cinema guild ANICA named on behalf of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Deadline lists its five members: Giorgio Carlo Brugnoni, Cristina Comencini, Federica Lucisano, Francesco Melzi D'Eril and Nick Vivarelli. They had 21 titles to weigh, among them two other Venice competition entries, Nanni Moretti's It Will Happen Tonight and Marco Bechis's Back to Buenos Aires.

The committee explained its pick in a single sentence, quoted by Il Fatto Quotidiano on September 23, 2026: « è un film nuovo, di genere, di un giovane autore, che ha da poco iniziato il suo percorso ed è stato apprezzato dal pubblico e dalla critica nazionale e internazionale ». In plain English, a new genre film by a young director, liked by audiences and critics at home and abroad.

Il Fatto Quotidiano called the decision a bold one. In its reading, Italy has tended to send the Academy minimalist, political or strictly auteur films, and a pure genre piece breaks with that habit. Variety adds the stakes: Italy last won the category in 2014, with Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty.

Strippoli had been to the Lido before. Screen Daily notes that The Holy Boy played Venice out of competition a year earlier, and calls The Spiral his most mainstream film to date. The shoot was short. English Wikipedia records that filming took place in Rome and Apulia over seven weeks and wrapped on July 25, 2025.

A mother, a daughter and a stranger in a beige raincoat

The film opens on a night of lashing rain in Rome. Anna, played by Jasmine Trinca, turns up unannounced at the flat of her adult daughter Alice (Romana Maggiora Vergano) to announce that the family's story rests on a lie. From there the film slides back in time to the Colonna family in Bari, in Puglia, in the final years of the 1990s. Cinematik, an Italian review site, describes the household in detail. Walter (Adriano Giannini) runs a prestigious tailoring house that dresses Bari's upper middle class, their son Tobia is a promising footballer, and Alice is taking her first steps in advertising. Anna, in the reviewer's words, is the ideal wife and mother, though she carries the regret of an acting career that never happened.

Then comes an accident at a party, and a hospital chapel. There Anna meets the stranger of the title, played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who offers to save Alice's leg in exchange for a favour. Deadline's reviewer Damon Wise sums up the mechanics: each bargain solves one problem by creating a worse one, and the stranger always returns with a new offer, « A life for a life ».

Three of the four leads are women, and the story is carried by a mother, her daughter and the supernatural woman who comes between them. Screen Daily's Lee Marshall found it fun to see Trinca, often cast as a working-class firebrand, play a status-obsessed woman who cannot bear to lose control of her family's trajectory.

Attention is quietly the currency of the plot. Anna sighs « We were what others wanted to be », and Deadline notes that Alice's budding acting career nearly landed a lucrative pasta advertisement before the family dog ended it. A family that lives for its image is the one the stranger prices most easily.

One performance, opposite verdicts

The performance of Bruni Tedeschi is where the critics part ways, and the split follows no national line.

Deadline's Wise, reviewing the Venice premiere on September 7, 2026, calls the film « a loud and very unsubtle piece of work » and means it kindly. He writes that Bruni Tedeschi is « so fabulous and fantastically devilish here that she should instantly be made illegal ». Screen Daily's Marshall, writing the same day, agrees on the actress: she is « by far the best thing about The Spiral », and rarely has she used her piping, sibilant delivery to better effect.

Marshall is much cooler on the film around her. His headline says it « promises more than it delivers », and he describes a structure that proceeds « intriguingly at first, but to diminishing returns », each flashback ending with the stranger fixing one problem by causing a worse one. He also calls it a self-consciously stylish piece, full of flashy crane shots and shallow focus.

In Italy, Cinematik's Giuseppe Bonsignore, writing in a preview review published this week, reached the opposite verdict on the same role. He praises the direction, the late-1990s reconstruction and Trinca's intense performance. But he calls the stranger the most controversial point of the film: in his view, Bruni Tedeschi struggles to carry the symbolic weight of the figure, and some moments turn unintentionally comic where tension was intended.

The Italian-language entry on Wikipedia, which collects reviews, reports a broadly positive reception at home and abroad. Its English counterpart gives 73% positive among 11 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and a Metacritic score of 73 out of 100 based on 8 critics. These are small samples, and aggregators count mixed reviews like Marshall's in their own way.

Other voices fill in the range. English Wikipedia records that Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave four stars out of five and judged Bruni Tedeschi's work the best of her career. It also records that Guy Lodge of Variety found the film less original than Strippoli's earlier work, yet saw it as further proof that he is « Italy's new horror virtuoso ». Italian Wikipedia adds two home-grown reviews: Mauro Donzelli of ComingSoon praises a hand that never wavers, while Carlo Valeri of Sentieri selvaggi finds Strippoli talented and interesting but still a little unripe and rough in touch, and aware of what genre can do inside the industry.

A devil that sounds like customer care

One line in the Screen Daily review ties the film to the present. Marshall writes that Bruni Tedeschi's stranger « does sympathy the way an AI-trained bot might », delivering her offer in a tone that only a desperate mother would fail to find chilling.

Wise reaches for the same decade. He reads the film's message, in what he calls today's clouded world of AI, deepfakes and disinformation, as a reminder to read the terms and conditions before accepting a deal. Neither critic says the film is about artificial intelligence, and the screenplay, by Strippoli and Salvatore De Chirico, tells a story that begins in the late 1990s. Marshall also finds, buried in the film, an idea about how tempting it is « to blame the gods, the evil eye, or a raincoated stranger » for troubles that are self-inflicted. In his view the idea is buried so deep that it may not exist. The stranger, in other words, is an easy figure to blame, which is precisely her job in the plot.

From Toronto's midnight crowd to the Academy calendar

The film travelled quickly after Venice. English Wikipedia lists a runner-up place for the People's Choice Award in the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto International Film Festival, at a ceremony dated September 20, 2026. Il Fatto Quotidiano, for its part, notes that the film left Venice with no prize from the jury, as did the other four Italian titles in competition. Italian Wikipedia lists two side awards for best Italian film.

A jury of professionals passed it over in September, the midnight audience put it second, and Italian film professionals then bet on it for the Academy.

For the film's commercial life, Marshall expects the cast of familiar local faces to attract a crossover crowd in Italy, where 01 Distribution handles the release. He adds that the film could find further buyers beyond the territories already sold. The French company Le Pacte holds international sales. The coverage gives no release date for the United States or the United Kingdom.

The calendar from here is fixed. The Academy announces its shortlist of 15 international features on December 15, 2026, the final five nominees on January 21, 2027, and the 99th Academy Awards ceremony takes place in Los Angeles on March 14, 2027.