Deadline's review from the Venice Film Festival praises Paolo Strippoli's "The Spiral" as a fiendishly enjoyable horror-thriller competing in the festival's main line-up, calling it a welcome dose of commercial genre entertainment amid a slate dominated by weighty documentaries and reality-based dramas. The critic finds it an unashamedly loud and unsubtle film that nonetheless taps into universal themes, likening it to a mix of Paolo Sorrentino's "The Great Beauty" and Saki's short story "The Monkey's Paw", and singles out Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's performance as a sinister, devil-like stranger as a highlight.

The story follows Anna (Jasmine Trinca), a wealthy Italian mother whose family is beset by uncanny misfortune after her daughter Alice is mauled by a dog and her son Tobia begins gaining dangerous amounts of weight. A mysterious stranger, played by Bruni Tedeschi, repeatedly offers Anna Faustian bargains to save her children, each deal twisting into further disaster. The review highlights the film's gothic, flashback-driven structure, its visual nods to Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now", and its inventive escalation of the family's curse, while noting the film also co-stars Adriano Giannini and Alessandro Carbonara.