Italy's Oscar Pick: A Demonic Stranger and a Faustian Pact
Italy's candidate in the best international feature category of the 2027 Academy Awards is Paolo Strippoli's thriller “The Spiral.” Valeria Bruni Tedeschi plays a demonic character called The Stranger, who entices a young mother — Jasmine Trinca — into forging a Faustian pact. That is a compact machine for a thriller: a tempter, a person who wants something badly, and a contract that names a price. In any Faust story the question is never whether the devil turns up; it's what the human being was willing to sign for.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Worth noting who does the tempting here: Bruni Tedeschi's Stranger, a woman, working on a young mother. In the usual telling the devil gets to be charming and the human gets to be the one who suffers for it — this version puts the charm and the leverage on the same side.
That's the cast list talking, not the film. Still, the pact form does something a haunted-house plot can't: it makes the mother's wanting the engine of the horror rather than something done to her.