Directed by Eriprando Visconti (Oedipus orca) and written by Luciano Lucignani, Fabio Mauri, Roselyne Sesboue, Lisa Morpurgo and Visconti from the book by Michele Prisco, A Spiral of Mist starts with Fabrizio (Marc Porel) killing his wife Valeria (Carole Chauvet) with a shotgun.

Maria Teresa (Claude Jade), his cousin, believes there’s no way he could do it. She hopes that her lawyer husband Marcello (Duilio Del Prete) can convince Judge Renato Marinoni (Stefano Satta Flores) that Fabrizio is innocent.

In flashback, the movie shows us the unhappy marriages of both women and how Valeria tried to set up Maria Teresa with another lawyer, Cesare Molteni (Roberto Posse). Today, Maria has a child that really was the child of her driver (Flavio Andreini) and housekeeper Armida (Anna Bonaiuto), as her husband is impotent.

The oral sex scene between Chauvet and Porel is really hard to watch because it’s unerotic and as disturbing as a sex scene can get. Supposedly, Chauvet actually was doing it for real while Porel’s wife was watching, which caused a major uproar. Or that could be IMDB BS. This movie has just as much male frontal nudity as female, which is rare for a movie from any county.

A Spiral of Mist is more about the disintegration of relationships and expectations of love than it is a giallo, but it does have some elements of the form.