Name: L'estranea
Director: Paolo Strippoli

Paolo Strippoli has world-premiered L’estranea in the main competition of the 83rd Venice Film Festival, the evening gala in the Sala Grande handed to a director who, until now, has lived on the horror-and-streaming edge of Italian cinema rather than at its prestige centre. At 33, Strippoli is one of the youngest names in this year’s Concorso, and the leap from genre to the Lido is the story his premiere tells before a single review lands.

Strippoli came up fast and came up frightening. He co-directed A Classic Horror Story with Roberto De Feo, a 2021 Netflix title that travelled far on the strength of its nasty, self-aware craft, then made the possession-tinged Piove on his own the following year. That is the toolkit — dread, escalation, the family as a haunted house — that he now brings into a competition better known for slow-cinema and social realism.

He is not hiding it. Strippoli has pitched L’estranea as “a family saga about the fall of a Bari business dynasty, where Buddenbrooks meets Faust” and as “a merciless, visceral pop tragedy” — a description that promises Thomas Mann’s decaying bourgeoisie run through a horror engine. The premise is spare: a woman turns up unannounced at her daughter’s home to confess the truth about their family, a truth rooted in a pact she struck years earlier with a stranger, and that bargain has come back to collect.

The casting is where the ambition shows. Jasmine Trinca and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi anchor the film, with Romana Maggiora Vergano and Adriano Giannini completing an ensemble that reads as a deliberate bid for seriousness — two of the most respected actresses in Italian and Franco-Italian cinema lending their weight to a director half their vintage. L’estranea runs 115 minutes and is an Italy–France–Belgium co-production, backed by Propaganda Italia and Rai Cinema alongside France’s Kazak Productions and Belgium’s Tarantula.

The setting is not incidental to any of this. Strippoli, born in Corato just outside Bari, has planted his family tragedy in the industrial bourgeoisie of the Italian south — a milieu of self-made money, closed doors and inherited silence that Italian screens rarely treat as the stuff of prestige drama. Rooting a story of collapse in a place he knows lets the horror grow out of a recognizable world rather than a generic haunted house, and it gives Trinca and Bruni Tedeschi something concrete to play: not gothic archetypes but a mother and a family with a specific accent and a specific shame. Giannini and Maggiora Vergano, both of a younger and rising register, fill out a household built to fracture on camera.

It arrives as one of five Italian films in this year’s competition, and the most useful way to read its selection is as a barometer. Festivals that once quarantined genre in the midnight slots have spent the last decade letting horror and its cousins onto the main stage, and a Barbera line-up that puts a director of Netflix horror in the Golden Lion race is part of that shift. Whether L’estranea justifies the promotion is exactly what a first screening cannot settle: the pop-tragedy register Strippoli is reaching for can curdle into camp as easily as it can tighten into dread, and 115 minutes of a dynasty’s collapse asks the audience to stay inside the discomfort.

L’estranea competes for the Golden Lion, awarded on 12 September by the jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal, and reaches Italian cinemas on 8 October.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, 2026, Jasmine Trinca, Paolo Strippoli, L'estranea, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi

Paolo Strippoli Carries His Genre Instincts Into Venice Competition With ‘L’estranea’

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