{"id":890022,"date":"2026-09-10T03:46:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T03:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/890022\/"},"modified":"2026-09-10T03:46:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T03:46:10","slug":"the-fire-within-you-review-an-insufferable-family-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/890022\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Fire Within You’ Review: An Insufferable Family Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tLet\u2019s hope there was a giant extractor fan on the set of \u201cThe Fire Within You<\/a>,\u201d because the stench of burnt oil must have been overwhelming. It\u2019s not only food that gets blistered in Edoardo De Angelis<\/a>\u2019 overwrought screaming match, which makes one envious of the wax Odysseus had handy to plug up his sailors\u2019 ears. In his case, the sounds were of sirens, whereas the characters here would give the harpies a run for their money, making them seem almost dulcet-toned in comparison. Set in a family\u2019s apartment on Christmas Eve and featuring a mother so monstrous not even the Ancient Greeks could have conjured her up, one can only imagine what kind of pressure was on the Venice Film Festival<\/a> to place it in competition.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLa mamma \u00e8 sempre la mamma\u201d is a common Italian expression \u2014 \u201cthe mother is always the mother\u201d \u2014 and her sacred position in the nation\u2019s psyche, tied of course to a couple of millennia spent worshiping the Virgin Mary, renders her an inviolable figure. No matter how nasty she may be, no matter how unfit she is to be a mother, her position is untouchable. For Italian audiences, that means Angela (Vanessa Scalera) can spew bile nonstop, but there\u2019s no question her children will stick by her. For most everyone else, it\u2019s impossible to escape the thought that if they\u2019ve put up with this termagant for so many years, they deserve every moment together. But why drag us into it?<\/p>\n

\n\tAngela\u2019s clearly already had a tipple in the kitchen when she excoriates her adult son Antonio (Lino Musella) for not having the guts to slit a live capon\u2019s throat. With a cigarette dangling from her lips, ashes and curse words ever ready to fall, Angela lurches around the house critical of everything and everyone. She pours venom on Antonio, a successful literary editor, telling him he\u2019s a useless wimp. Her daughter-in-law Benedetta (Elena Radonicich) is dismissed for not knowing her way around a stove top and, what\u2019s worse, she\u2019s the reason why Neapolitan-raised Antonio lives in Milan. Grandson Andrea (Samuele Mazza) is a \u201cfaggot\u201d because he takes ballet classes, and granddaughter Valentina (Nicole Malaj) is a vegetarian, which makes her pathetic.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer cooking is as poisonous as her words, yet both gush out in a non-stop flow of over-fried eggplant, aggressively hacked cod and salad drowning in oil. With the arrival of Angela\u2019s daughter Paola (Ivana Lotito), the nastiness increases \u2014 at least Paola has the ability to talk back, unlike Antonio, who keeps taking abuse, such as \u201cit would have been better if you had died at birth,\u201d until he finally explodes, accompanied by a burst of shattered glass.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s all so tediously predictable, shot with unsteady camera movements as if the tensions inside the sole location needed visual reinforcement. Because the plot required an outsider to expose more of the family\u2019s history of dysfunctionality, an uninvited guest arrives in the form of Giulio (Tommaso Ragno), a writer who\u2019ll be collaborating with Antonio on his next novel. An increasingly drunk Angela gets all flirty, alternating suggestive glances with a barrage of pointed insults designed to inflict maximum damage at everyone around her and then, with a plot twist that could be seen a mile off, new information arrives designed to elicit sympathy from this harridan\u2019s children as well as the audience. La mamma \u00e8 sempre la mamma.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a thankless role for Vanessa Scalera, pushed to extremes and forced to embody a woman whose one trait is bitterness; the script, based on a novel by Antonio Franchini, doesn\u2019t even attempt to give her motivation. Angela takes up so much space there\u2019s barely room for anything other than caricature, such as Paola\u2019s laughable Buddhist husband Edoardo (Tony Laudadio), or Andrea, initially given some personality but then seen ludicrously performing ballet moves in the apartment \u2014 like Ann Miller in \u201cThe Man Who Came to Dinner,\u201d only that film was a comedy.<\/p>\n

\n\tPerhaps some Italians will find Neapolitan Angela\u2019s constant harping about Milan humorous, though far more amusing is how the film tries to pass off Antonio\u2019s apartment as a Milan location, when everything about it (confirmed by the closing credits) says Naples. On top of it all, De Angelis (\u201cThe Vice of Hope\u201d) decided the screaming matches needed a musical accompaniment of equal force. Between the noxious taunts, bubbling grease and cigarettes stubbed out in pasta, it\u2019s enough to give anyone indigestion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s hope there was a giant extractor fan on the set of \u201cThe Fire Within You,\u201d because the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":890023,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,302714,75,337,308556,4186],"class_list":["post-890022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-edoardo-de-angelis","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-the-fire-within-you","tag-venice-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/890023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=890022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=890022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}