A Game of Rescue and Sacrifice

𝙻'𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚎𝚊/ 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚂𝚙𝚒𝚛𝚊𝚕

𝙳𝚒𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢 Paolo Stri

𝚅𝚎𝚗𝚒𝚌𝚎 𝙵𝚒𝚕𝚖 𝙵𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚊𝚕 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟼

The film’s spiral movement begins on the face of the domestic worker’s young son—a face that holds the pain of his mother’s humiliation. In the middle of a party, Anna shouts at the woman working in her kitchen. Yet instead of staying focused on Anna, the camera turns to the child’s reaction. Agitated and anxious, the boy transfers his distress over his mother’s humiliation to the doll in his hands. His fingers repeatedly press against its body until he finally breaks off its arm.

At this precise moment, the film’s circular movement begins: negative energy passes from Anna to the worker, from the mother’s pain to the child’s face and body, and from the child’s hand to the doll’s broken arm. The violence does not remain confined to the kitchen. It travels from human being to object, from object to animal, and from animal to human bodies. With every turn, it returns to Anna and her family in a different form.

The darkness in The Spiral does not originate in a demonic force, but in an entirely human act: the moment when a powerful person humiliates someone with less power. Anna may forget the incident shortly afterwards, but the child cannot forget the sight of his mother being degraded. A wound that is neither acknowledged nor processed does not disappear. It changes form, travels through the world, and finds its way into another body.

The recurring children’s rhyme that returns to Anna’s mind—and that she, in turn, teaches her children—passes this pattern of denial from one generation to the next: close your eyes and the wounds and pain will disappear. The film uses the rhyme not merely as a childhood memory, but as a learned way of avoiding suffering. From an early age, Anna has learned that instead of looking directly at a wound, she can close her eyes and imagine it is no longer there. But a wound does not vanish when it remains unseen; it survives in the darkness, takes root, and eventually resurfaces in another person’s body or life. Like the children’s rhyme itself, Anna passes this method of denial on to her children.

Years later, the same child is among those who torment Toby, Anna’s son. They climb onto his back, call him a “pig”, and force him to make pig noises. This sound is not merely part of a childish act of bullying. It seems to recreate the feeling the boy experienced years earlier when he heard Anna shouting at his mother. The child who was powerless to respond when his mother was humiliated now forces Anna’s son to produce the sound of the suffering he once had to hear.

The film turns this sound into an auditory motif. The pig noises later return in Toby’s repeated shortness of breath and the muffled, rattling sounds he makes beneath the respiratory equipment in intensive care. What first appeared as mockery and a violent game now emerges from his body on the threshold between life and death. Like bodies and objects, sound acquires a memory. It passes from one mouth to another and eventually returns to Anna through the victim’s broken breathing.

The dog inherited from Anna’s parents, along with the villa in which it lives, forms another link in this chain. The animal severely injures Alice’s leg, placing her at risk of losing it. The doll’s broken arm from the first link in the chain now reappears as an injury to the daughter’s leg. The energy remains the same, but the limb, the body, and the victim have changed.

In the popular imagination, a dog attacking its owner evokes rabies—a disease that transforms a domesticated, protective, and loyal animal into an aggressive force. A similar transformation appears in Anna. A loving and protective mother, afflicted by the sickness of control and grandiosity, becomes someone who harms her own children. Just as disease disrupts an animal’s natural behaviour, Anna’s obsessive desire to save her children diverts the instinct of care from its proper course: affection becomes possession, protection becomes domination, and the mother who should provide refuge becomes an attacking force.

Anna cannot accept impairment, accident, or helplessness. She is a wealthy and privileged woman accustomed to making decisions. She has imagined a future in acting for her daughter and a path in football for her son. Maternal love gradually becomes entangled with possession. She no longer wants to care for her children; she believes she has the right to take control of their bodies, futures, and destinies.

The Spiral opens with a stressful flight. The roar of the aircraft, Anna’s hands gripping the armrests, and the jewelled ring shaped like a two-headed serpent reveal two sides of her character: a privileged, powerful woman who becomes consumed by anxiety as control begins to slip away.

The safety card in front of her reminds passengers that, in an emergency, they must first place the oxygen mask over their own face before helping a child. The image establishes the film’s central question: can someone who has not saved herself truly save another person?

Anna arrives unannounced at her daughter’s home in Rome to reveal a truth she has kept hidden for years. But Alice’s reaction does not correspond to the image Anna has of their relationship. Rather than affection or longing, the daughter’s face and body convey fear, anger, and a desire for distance. From the outset, a fracture opens between the mother’s perception and the child’s experience.

The family Anna remembers as happy and complete does not exist in the same form in her children’s memories.

Alice’s leg is the first thing Anna attempts to reclaim from fate. The woman previously seen at the party reappears at precisely the moment when Anna’s ordinary power is no longer sufficient to alter what has happened. She promises to save the girl’s leg, but in the world of the film every rescue carries a price. The damage is not destroyed; it is merely transferred from one body to another. Alice keeps her leg, but Toby loses the possibility of becoming a footballer.

This is not the result of Anna excessively feeding her son. Toby’s uncontrollable appetite and severe obesity can instead be understood as the physical manifestation of the bargain, or perhaps as the embodiment of an unconscious decision within his mother’s psyche. After the injury to her leg, Alice can no longer continue towards a future as a ballerina and must pursue another dream through acting. Perhaps, at some hidden level of her psyche, Anna cannot tolerate the idea that while her daughter’s path has been altered, her son should remain free to pursue his own dream of football. Alice’s leg is preserved, but Toby loses the possibility of using his own legs to realize a different ambition.

With each turn of the spiral, saving one person creates a new wound in another life. Toby’s physical crisis, the father’s collapse, and the incident that transforms the lives of another mother and child are all links in this same movement. Each time, Anna imagines that by selecting another victim she has settled the previous debt. In reality, every choice merely sends the energy outside the family, only for it to return in another form.

After his financial ruin, the father turns to alcohol. His inability to end his own life directly transfers the violence from his body to the bodies of others. Driving while intoxicated destroys the lives of a mother and child: one is left in a coma and the other permanently dependent on a wheelchair. At first, Anna believes that her husband’s death has settled the family’s debt and that sacrificing the father can serve as payment for saving Alice and Toby. She does not appear deeply troubled by his death on an emotional level; it is as though taking a father away from his children is an acceptable price for preserving her own peace. This choice marks another turning point in the revelation of Anna’s need for domination. Yet before he is gone, the man creates two new wounds in the world.

The meaning of the “stranger” emerges through this process. Anna wants suffering to remain distant from those she loves, even if it must fall upon the body of someone she does not know. But the film shows that being a stranger is never permanent.

When the family’s daughter-in-law and her unborn child hover between life and death during childbirth, the boundary between the intimate and the outsider collapses. Someone who could once be sacrificed for standing outside the family’s emotional circle has now become part of that very family.

Anna never changes fate; she merely changes the route along which the wound travels. What was not taken from Alice’s body years earlier returns to the same leg after passing through several other lives. Pain cannot be eliminated by selecting a new victim, and suffering cannot be contained forever within the body of a “stranger”.

Whenever an event moves beyond Anna’s control, she runs towards the church. This movement is less an act of religious faith than the flight of someone who realizes that wealth, will, and power are not enough to change destiny. The entire universe cannot be held in one’s hands and forced to move according to an individual will. Anna enters the church at moments when she can no longer carry out her decisions in the physical world. It is as though she seeks refuge in its dark solitude to discover, within herself, another way to continue exercising control.

The film’s contradiction lies here: Anna flees to the church to contain a force that her own behaviour first set in motion. She wants to change the outcome without returning to the point of origin. She wants to save her family, yet she still cannot see that it was she who first struck this coiled spring when she humiliated a child’s mother.

The stranger takes shape in the distance between Anna’s desire and her human limitations. She is not separate from Anna, but rather the decision-making and controlling spirit of her psyche: the part that appears in moments of helplessness, selects victims, and promises that the world can still be forced into obedience. To preserve her self-image as a loving and protective mother, Anna projects the destructive part of herself into the form of another woman.

In their pursuit of power and control over others' lives, people can reach a point where they no longer see themselves as ordinary human beings. They imagine that they understand more than others, possess the right to choose, and can make decisions in place of fate. Because Anna is a mother who loves her family, she grants herself precisely such a right. The film’s terror lies in this certainty: the belief that love can authorize one person to determine the value of other people’s lives.

The spiral structure does not exist only within the narrative. The coiled shape of the chocolates Anna eats, the repetition of damaged limbs, the transformation of identities, and the return of images all extend the geometry of the spiral into the film’s visual details. The flood and storm also belong to this cycle. The energy that began with the humiliation of one person and passed through a child, a doll, an animal, and the bodies of a family now encompasses nature itself. The external world reflects the family’s concealed disorder.

Through its repetitions, unstable perception, and transformation of identity, the film recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Here, however, rather than a man attempting to reconstruct a woman according to his desired image, we encounter a mother who turns her children’s bodies, professions, and destinies into a personal project. The other person is no longer an autonomous human being, but an object to be saved, reconstructed, and controlled.

Paolo Strippoli creates this world between reality, fantasy, and delirium through the performances of Jasmine Trinca, Romana Maggiora Vergano, Adriano Giannini, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. As Anna, Trinca holds anxiety, affection, selfishness, and the desire for power simultaneously within her body and gaze. The force of her performance prevents Anna from being understood only as a devoted mother or a destructive woman.

As Alice, Romana Maggiora Vergano carries a silence and anger whose meaning gradually becomes clear. Even her short hair can be read as an indication of suppressed rage and her desire to separate herself from the image her mother constructed for her. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi gives Anna’s imaginary woman a presence suspended between double, spirit, and inner force.

The film does not turn Anna into a monster, and this is precisely what gives the character her significance. Her desire to save her children is understandable. Any parent might, for a moment, wish that a child’s pain could be transferred to another body. The tragedy begins when that wish becomes an assumed right to choose—when love appears to authorize a person to decide over the bodies, lives, and deaths of others.

In the end, Alice destroys the physical body of Anna, her mother. The act is not merely personal revenge; it is a reclamation of the bodily autonomy her mother bargained over years earlier. It is as though Alice has long been waiting for the opportunity to end the authority of a mother who confused love with possession and rescue with control.

When Alice removes the spiral-shaped chocolate attached to the sole of her foot, the gesture signals the end of Anna’s cycle of delusion and grandiosity. After killing her mother’s body, Alice also removes the sign of her controlling psyche from her own body. The coil is detached from the same foot around which the original bargain was made. It is as though the daughter, with her own hand, frees her body from a contract her mother created without her consent.

Then the flood arrives, washing everything away, and sunlight follows. This light does not mean that the past has been erased; bodies continue to carry the memory of what they have endured. Yet for the first time, the possibility arises that the transmission of pain might be stopped. Unlike her mother, Alice does not choose another victim to save herself. She destroys the body through which that control operated and removes the spiral from her own foot.

Although the film does not speak directly about psychotherapy, its world can also be read from this perspective. Psychotherapy may offer such a moment: the moment when the tension of the coiled spring begins to release, childhood wounds are brought out of hiding, pain is named, and its transmission to another person is interrupted. This does not mean erasing the past or defeating fate, but recognizing a wound that, if ignored, will pass from one human being to another and from one generation to the next.

The Spiral is about an act that may occupy only a few minutes in the life of a powerful person but become a lasting wound within someone else. If it remains unseen and untreated, that wound passes through human beings, animals, objects, and nature, eventually returning in another form to the point where it began. Anna wanted to hold the entire universe in her hands to save her family, without recognizing that the first force she needed to contain had originated in her own behaviour and within herself.