In case it wasn’t obvious from the circular licorice candies or the various images of shrinking loops scattered throughout L’Estranea (The Spiral), co-writer and director Paolo Strippoli makes the motif unmistakable when a menacing teen bully wears a Jigsaw graphic tee emblazoned with the titular shape. By that point in the film, the spiral that matters most is psychological in nature.

The Spiral works in the framework of the fairy tale for adults. From the beginning, it’s clear this film is meant to deliver an instructive moral lesson, and Strippoli isn’t afraid to sacrifice an image’s subtlety for the strength of his idea’s delivery. What he and co-writer Salvatore de Chirico cook up comes out to something of a contemporary spin on Rumpelstiltskin with a dash of Faust thrown in for good measure.

Strippoli’s fable follows several decades of fallout from a single fateful day in the life of a wealthy family in southern Italy. Matriarch Anna (Jasmine Trinca) appears poised to sublimate her own desire for success through her two high-achieving children. But no sooner does she scream in joy about her daughter, Alice, booking a prestigious commercial than she screams in agony. Their newly adopted dog mauls the young girl and puts one of her legs at risk of amputation.

In her moment of weakness, a mysterious figure (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) emerges from the pew of a hospital chapel. This woman, credited only as Stranger, offers a simple choice in a fraught scenario. She can save Alice’s leg, so long as she is willing to let her other child, Tobia, gain some weight that he will never be able to shake off entirely. The trade essentially boils down to her daughter’s career chances for her son’s competitive edge, since Tobia trains extensively to play in an elite youth soccer league.

This decision is the first of many instances in which Anna must weigh trading one person’s livelihood for another’s life. Each iteration of this dilemma that piles up over the course of The Spiral weighs increasingly heavily because she’s more implicated in their plight and misery. As she recounts these instances of her implication in the plight of loved ones, what seems like a deceitful demon preying on their family slowly reveals itself as something else entirely.

Leave it to a grown-up Alice, long estranged from her mother, to call BS on this exceedingly risible narrative. She recognizes the Stranger as a manifestation of the ​“bargaining” stage of grief, one that also gives Anna the illusion of agency in these tragedies. This external force, Alice also notes, conveniently absolves her of any responsibility for wrecking their future.

Yet The Spiral is unprepared to make good on this complexity it suggests in Anna. This higher-order insinuation behind her motivations is built for a different screenplay than the one Strippoli wrote. His horror-thriller relies on broad genre archetypes, rarely developing any figure beyond a single identifying trait or activity. The nearly two-hour runtime is a lot of time to spend with such unidimensional characters.

This tendency is most pronounced in the first chapter, which really lays on thick the effects of Tobia’s precipitous weight gain. The grotesque is a common tool of genre storytelling, but Strippoli’s catastrophizing of his fuller figure reflects the superficial treatment of actions and consequences. The Spiral gets more intriguing as the Stranger’s binary options for Anna become more existential. A viewer’s willingness to forgive these earlier blunders, however, may depend on how exhausted they are by watching the same pattern play out four times.