Between mystery and psychological thriller, the third Italian film in competition investigates the terror of losing control and the inevitability of destiny. And he gives us a new director to follow with interest
He knows how to do it Paolo Strippoli! We waited The stranger with positive curiosity. And expectations were well placed. The third Italian film in competition at Venezia 83 is an exciting breath of fresh air in the Italian cinema scene. A further step forward in the growth of the young Apulian director who, with his family history of compromises and horrors, captivates and surprises.
The plot of The stranger
After having already been at the Lido last year out of competition with The valley of smilesStrippoli returns from the front door. Also thanks to director Barbera, who had no qualms about including a film that was certainly unusual and with some horror features in the main competition of the Venice Film Festival 2026. Between psychological thriller, mystery and family saga, The stranger it has powerful images that play with beauty and anxiety. The feeling of pleasant amazement it leaves you with? Similar to the overwhelming one it generated in 2016 They called him Jeeg Robot.
In contemporary Rome, during a heavy storm, Alice (played by Romana Maggiora Vergano) receives a sudden visit from her mother Anna (Jasmine Trinca). “Everything you think you know about our family history is a lie”: thus begins the story of a family parable between success and fall.
Anna and Walter (Adriano Giannini) are happy and successful parents in Bari in 1999. “Breathe deeply, breathe slowly, if you close your eyes evil is far away”, is the chant that she teaches to her children. Until life asks for the bill.
To alter the natural and fatal course of things, however, appears a stranger to Mephistophelian behavior – and irresistible comic cynicism – (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), ready to propose alternative futures. But behind every choice there is a consequence, which opens up an inevitable spiral of further consequences.
The fear of losing control over life
«I know this woman very well and for me she is not a stranger but an old friend, she is perhaps 2-3 years younger than me, and she has always proposed dilemmas and choices to make», Valeria Bruni Tedeschi bursts out on the Lido, with her exhilarating energy. «At every step he asks me to choose between the right foot and the left foot, he is a very familiar presence. So when Paolo proposed the film to me I asked this old friend if she wanted to do it and she said yes. It’s very tiring, but also nice.”
In their splendid villa with swimming pool and green lawn, Anna and Walter do their utmost to make their children’s (their own) dreams come true. But when fate goes off track, she does everything she can to erase the last hand of the dice.
«This story was born a long time ago from my greatest fear: losing control», Strippoli, who also wrote the screenplay together with, tells Lido Salvatore De Chirico. «I am obsessed with the idea of losing control, I am a director on purpose, because I delude myself into shaping reality in this way. The seed of the greatest mental problems is when we encounter the impossibility of controlling life because things happen and they don’t ask us for permission.”
The spiral as geometry of the film
One of the recurring elements of The stranger is the spiral (it is no coincidence that the international title is The spiral), from the liquorice swirls that Anna repeatedly eats as a stress reliever to the anthill in the garden of the villa in Bari to the storm vortex in the sky of Rome. «The spiral is the geometry of the film. It is an image that obsessively returns to remind us the inevitability of destinybut it is also the very structure of the story: each chapter is shorter and more excited than the previous one and rushes us towards a center that is both beginning and end. Every choice takes Anna back to her point of origin, where the truth that she doesn’t want to see is hidden”, is Strippoli’s explanation.
Every element left suspended during the narrative is closed with tailor’s skill in the four chapters that follow one another until the epilogue. Everything adds up, everything is sewn with a mature and talented hand. «The stranger it’s in continuity with what I’ve done before. Jokingly I say that it is the third chapter of the “Rain Trilogy”an element also present in Rains And The valley of smiles» says the thirty-three-year-old director. «The stranger it is not an attack on the traditional family. I just want to explore how the traditional family is a small mirror of the larger society. I attack the family that puts the external world ahead of the internal one.”
It’s certain: we have a new Italian director to follow with interest and joy. The stranger will be released in cinemas on 8 October with 01 Distribution.
