Review: The Fire Within You
- VENICE 2026: Vanessa Scalera’s stunning performance anchors Edoardo De Angelis’s dense, funny and touching family drama
Populism, racism, classism, selfishness, opportunism, flip-flopping, that half-baked culture that’s worse than ignorance, rancour... These are some of the “flaws” embodied by Angela, the mother of Antonio Franchina, author of the autobiographical book Il fuoco che ti porti dentro, published in 2024. Neapolitan director Edoardo De Angelis dedicates his sixth feature to this strong, impossible woman - a woman who “needs to hate as much as she needs to breathe, who feels she doesn’t exist unless she is opposing something” - giving it the title The Fire Within You and sending it into the running for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
The director, who co-wrote the screenplay with Francesco Piccolo and Ilaria Macchia, chooses to condense Franchina’s memoir into a single day, Christmas Eve, turning the film into a kind of 2.0 version of The Nativity Scene, Eduardo De Filippo’s theatrical masterpiece - not least since De Angelis adapted it into a TV movie for Rai at Christmas 2020. We’re in Milan, in the elegant flat of Angela’s son, Antonio (a superb Lino Musella), who fled Naples and his mother’s suffocating grip years earlier and has become a literary agent for established writers. Gathered for the holiday are Antonio's wife, Benedetta (Elena Radonicich), and their two children (Nicole Malaj and Samuele Mazza) as well as Antonio’s sister, Paola (Ivana Lotito), all joined by the mother, played by a breathtaking Vanessa Scalera, who intends to stay on in Milan.
Angela, on the hunt for an elusive capon she wants to slaughter and roast in the oven, is a kind of steamroller, a torrent of negative judgements and insults that spare no one (“You’re as pretty as an ornament,” she tells her daughter-in-law, thinking it's a compliment). Between cigarettes, she counters her son’s polished Italian with Neapolitan dialect crammed with vulgarities and tired old clichés. She calls her son a failed writer, blames him for destroying her life (“You should never have been born”), her self-pity veering into self-destruction. The evening takes a turn when the hugely popular writer Giulio Simonetti (Tommaso Ragno), whom Antonio has asked to join his roster, calls and invites himself to Christmas dinner (his young wife having thrown him out). Angela brings out some unexpected charm for the distinguished guest, but soon, the mother-son face-off becomes untenable, and this all-out war that Antonio is once again forced into risks jeopardising the most important deal of his career.
De Angelis’s dense drama, set in a single location and unfolding in real time (bar the final stretch), is masterfully shot, with several notable long takes that showcase the lead’s performance, leaning entirely on dialogue and mounting psychological tension. Vladan Radovic’s warm cinematography lights up the actors’ close-ups, propelled by the exuberant, thunderous score by La Niña, paraphrasing traditional Christmas music in pieces consisting of drums, bagpipes and shawms. Angela’s verbal excesses often raise laughs, but a moving ending awaits the viewer at the crossroads of a family relationship dominated by a mother who doesn’t know how to show love and doesn’t know how to be loved, and whose despair has upended her children’s lives. In the end, it isn’t about forgiving or justifying, but simply about loving.
The Fire Within You was produced by Picomedia together with Rai Cinema. Rai Cinema International Distribution is handling its international sales.
(Translated from Italian)
Photogallery 09/09/2026: Venice 2026 - Il fuoco che ti porti dentro
19 pictures available. Swipe left or right to see them all.
© 2026 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it
Did you enjoy reading this article? Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more stories like this directly in your inbox.
