The Fire Within You review – overheated family Christmas boils up too many stereotypes

Venice film festival: Edoardo De Angelis’s claustrophobic drama brings a raging mother up from Naples for the holidays, with a capon.

What could possibly not go wrong? If there were a Golden Lion award for the most Italian film in Venice competition it would go to Edoardo De Angelis’s squawking domestic spat of a picture which contains an imperious matriarch, a pained Catholic priest, an argumentative family, and food, so much food.

Bowls are stirred and pans are brandished.

Pots are seen rattling angrily on the stove.

The festival organisers like to deploy a little judicious home cooking when it comes to the selection and De Angelis is already a favoured guest, having opened the 2023 event with his war drama Comandante .

But I fear they may have miscalculated with this one.

It’s overdone, on the turn and too liberally salted with tears.

It’s liable to provoke the occasional stab of heartburn.

At the head of the table sits the incorrigible Angela (Vanessa Scalera).

She’s up from Naples (where she was presumably once a girl from the backstreets, begging in rags) to supervise Christmas Eve dinner at her son’s book-lined apartment in Milan.

Angela’s a relic of the old world, breezily unreconstructed and openly disgusted by the woke state of her grandchildren.

“One’s a gay dancer and the other’s a vegetarian,” she scoffs.

They in turn are perturbed by the fact that she has brought in a live chicken to be cooked as the main course.

Who’s going to catch it? Who’s going to kill it? What even is this creature, exactly? “It’s not a hen, it’s a capon,” sighs middle-aged Anto (Lino Musella), who dearly wishes his mother had never come at all.