In Giovanni Bognetti’s sequel to The Price of Family, a grandmother’s engagement does not bring the Delle Fave family together around a wedding. It brings them together around a plan to make sure the groom never reaches the altar.

Most family comedies treat the wedding as the finish line. The Price of Nonna’s Inheritance, released in Italy as Ricchi a tutti i costi, treats it as a deadline. When a wealthy grandmother announces that she is marrying a man with two dead wives behind him, her daughter decides the problem has only one solution, and the rest of the family, with one reluctant exception, signs up. Written and directed by Giovanni Bognetti for Netflix, the film reunites Christian De Sica and Angela Finocchiaro as the parents at the centre of the scheme.

The film premiered on Netflix on 4 June 2024 as an Italian original, with a running time of around 90 minutes. It is a direct sequel to The Price of Family (Natale a tutti i costi), the Christmas comedy Bognetti made for the same platform in 2022, and it brings back the whole Delle Fave household: Christian De Sica as Carlo, Angela Finocchiaro as Anna, Dharma Mangia Woods as their daughter Alessandra and Claudio Colica as their son Emilio. Where the first film was a family comedy with a lie at its centre, this one moves openly into black comedy.

A six-million-euro announcement that goes the wrong way

The story starts with a chance meeting. One evening Anna runs into Nunzio, an old flame from her high-school years whose past does not inspire much confidence. She turns down his advances and assumes that is the end of it. A month later the family gathers at a restaurant because grandma Giuliana, Anna’s mother, has news to share. Everyone at the table assumes it concerns her famous inheritance of six million euros. Instead, Giuliana announces that she is engaged, and the fiancé is Nunzio.

Anna does not need long to reach a verdict. Nunzio’s two previous wives were both much older than him, both wealthy and both died suddenly, and to her the pattern looks less like bad luck than like a method. When she tries to warn her mother, Giuliana brushes her off and reveals the plan: a wedding on the Spanish island of Menorca, followed by a move to Brazil. Anna concludes that the only way to protect her mother, and the money, is to kill Nunzio first. Carlo and Alessandra agree to help. Emilio is against it from the start.

Alessandra comes up with the method. Aconite, a poisonous plant that grows on Menorca, can cause death by asphyxiation that looks like a heart attack, which on paper keeps suspicion away from the family. The paper version does not survive the trip. The villa rented for the wedding turns out to be occupied by its caretaker, Luis, and his partner, Patricia, and a few days before the ceremony another guest arrives: Bojan, Nunzio’s best man and wedding planner, a Serbian who is temporarily blind after an accident. Every new person in the house is one more witness the conspirators have to work around.

The Delle Fave family, from Christmas lie to summer plot

The premise makes more sense next to the first film. In The Price of Family, a remake of the French comedy Mes très chers enfants (2021) by Alexandra Leclère, Carlo and Anna feel abandoned by their grown-up children, who have moved to the city and stopped coming home. To win them back for Christmas, the parents invent an inheritance of six million euros from an elderly aunt. The lie works a little too well, the bank account suffers, and the truth eventually comes out. In the final stretch the family discovers that the money was real after all: Giuliana had inherited it.

The sequel takes that twist as its starting point and turns it around. In the first film the parents lied about money to buy back their children’s affection. In the second, the money exists, it belongs to the grandmother, and the threat to it unites the whole family more than any holiday did. Even the titles mirror each other: Natale a tutti i costi, Christmas at any cost, becomes Ricchi a tutti i costi, rich at any cost. The setting moves from a provincial Italian Christmas to a summer wedding on a Mediterranean island.

Giovanni Bognetti, a screenwriter of Italian family comedies

Giovanni Bognetti came to cinema by a long route. Born in Milan, he spent several years in advertising and marketing before moving into television production, and he made his directing debut in 2006 with a short film, Le impronte della tartaruga. For most of the following decade he was a screenwriter of mainstream Italian comedies, writing for Paolo Ruffini (Fuga di cervelli, Tutto molto bello), for Alessandro Genovesi (Ma che bella sorpresa, Puoi baciare lo sposo, 10 giorni senza mamma) and for Guido Chiesa (Belli di papà, Ti presento Sofia, Cambio tutto!).

His first feature as director was I babysitter in 2016. In 2022 he wrote and directed two films, Il mammone and The Price of Family, the second of which took him to Netflix. On the first Delle Fave film the story credit went to Alexandra Leclère, whose French original he adapted. On the sequel the writing credit is Bognetti’s alone, which makes The Price of Nonna’s Inheritance the first time he has built a story for these characters from scratch.

Christian De Sica and Angela Finocchiaro as the conspirators

Christian De Sica, son of the director Vittorio De Sica, has spent decades as one of the faces of Italian popular comedy, above all the holiday comedies that made his name synonymous with Christmas releases. Casting him in a Netflix film called Natale a tutti i costi was a knowing wink at that history, and the sequel keeps him as Carlo, the husband who goes along with his wife’s plan. Angela Finocchiaro, born in Milan in 1955, won the David di Donatello for best supporting actress two years running, in 2006 and in 2007, the second time for Mio fratello è figlio unico. Here she plays Anna, the one who decides the groom has to go.

Dharma Mangia Woods and Claudio Colica return as the children, now pulled in opposite directions by the plan. Fioretta Mari plays Giuliana, the grandmother at the centre of it all. Nunzio is played by Ninni Bruschetta, an actor, director and screenwriter from Messina who co-founded the stage company Nutrimenti terrestri. The Spanish setting brings in a partly Spanish cast: Fernando Albizu plays the caretaker Luis, Irma Carolina Di Monte plays Patricia, and Darko Perić, the Serbian-Spanish actor best known as Helsinki in Money Heist, plays the blind wedding planner Bojan. Teresa Piergentili completes the cast as Marzia.

Menorca, a villa and a composer with a David di Donatello

Most of the film was shot on Menorca, mainly in and around Ciutadella, the old port town on the west of the island. Some scenes were filmed in Italy, in the Monte Argentario area between Orbetello and Talamone, and in Rome. The production comes from Colorado Film together with Sony Pictures, the same partnership behind the first film, and the move from a provincial Christmas to a Balearic summer is the most visible change between the two instalments.

Behind the camera, the cinematographer is Federico Annicchiarico, and Walter Marocchi, who also cut the first film, is the editor. The score is by Teho Teardo, who scored both Delle Fave films and whose credits elsewhere include Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo, the soundtrack that won him the David di Donatello in 2009. It is an unusual name to find on a popular family comedy: Teardo comes from the rock and experimental music scene and has recorded several albums with Blixa Bargeld.

Arsenic, old lace and the comedy of the clumsy murder

The comparison that comes to mind is Arsenic and Old Lace, Frank Capra’s 1944 comedy with Cary Grant, in which a respectable family hides a habit of poisoning people behind good manners. The Price of Nonna’s Inheritance works the same seam from the other side. The Delle Fave family are not killers; they are ordinary people who have never hurt anyone and decide that murder can be handled like any other household chore. The joke in that premise is the distance between intention and competence: a plan drawn up by people with no idea how such a thing is done.

That makes the film a close relative of the Italian comedy tradition built around money and family, where inheritances, wills and greedy relatives have supplied plots for generations. When the film came out, the Italian press was divided: the cast, and De Sica and Finocchiaro in particular, drew most of the praise, while the screenplay and the construction of the comic set pieces drew most of the doubts. The film keeps to a compact ensemble and one main location, the villa, which places the weight on dialogue and on the exchanges within a household rather than on spectacle.

What a family comedy owes its audience

The question the film raises is the one any black comedy about a family has to answer: how far can a story push its characters towards something terrible and still ask the audience to like them? Bognetti’s answer lies in the premise itself. Anna’s family plot their crime out of fear for a mother as much as for her fortune, and Emilio’s objections keep a conscience in the room.

Whether that balance holds is a matter for each viewer, and the divided reception suggests it does not hold for everyone. What the sequel does show is that the Delle Fave family, introduced at Christmas as a household falling apart, have found the one thing that keeps them together. It just happens to be a murder plan.

Tags: comedies, Italy, Angela Finocchiaro, Christian De Sica, Dharma Mangia Woods, Giovanni Bognetti