Name: Il fuoco che ti porti dentro
Director: Edoardo De Angelis
Cast: Vanessa Scalera

The whole of Il fuoco che ti porti dentro turns on a single arrival. Antonio has built a clean, successful life in Milan, at a careful distance from his mother; when she comes for Christmas and quietly makes clear she has no intention of leaving, the Christmas Eve dinner becomes the film. Edoardo De Angelis, who opened the 2023 Venice Film Festival with the wartime sea epic Comandante, world-premiered his new film in the main competition of the 83rd Mostra — and the swing from a submarine at war to a family at a dinner table is the most telling thing about it.

The structure is the argument. De Angelis compresses an entire history — a mother and son who have spent a lifetime failing to say the true thing — into the hours around one meal, so that every dish carried to the table lands like a move in a game neither can stop playing. It is adapted from Antonio Franchini’s autobiographical novel of the same title, a book about a Neapolitan mother of overwhelming personality, and the film keeps the source’s cruelty and its tenderness in the same grip: the woman at its centre is arrogant, frightened and desperate to control, and she is also, unmistakably, loved.

Vanessa Scalera has the role that decides everything. Best known as television’s Imma Tataranni, she plays Angela as a force that fills the frame and leaves the others fighting for air — the kind of part that can tip into caricature and doesn’t, because Scalera keeps finding the fear underneath the domineering. Around her De Angelis sets a dense ensemble — Lino Musella, Elena Radonicich, Ivana Lotito, Tommaso Ragno, Tony Laudadio — but the film is built as a duet, the son’s restraint against the mother’s flood, and its best scenes are the ones where nobody quite says what the whole table already knows.

What a first screening can’t yet settle is whether the compression holds for ninety-four minutes or whether a single dinner, stretched to feature length, starts to strain. The chamber form is unforgiving: with no submarine, no sea, no war to cut away to, the pressure has to come entirely from faces and silences. De Angelis has bet the film on the belief that a Christmas Eve table can hold as much dread as any battlefield — and that the thing families do to each other over dinner is worth the size of a competition premiere.

Il fuoco che ti porti dentro is the fourth of five Italian titles in competition this year and runs ninety-four minutes; RAI Cinema International is handling world sales. It competes for the Golden Lion, awarded on 12 September by the jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal, ahead of its Italian theatrical release.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, 2026, Edoardo De Angelis, Vanessa Scalera, Antonio Franchini, Il fuoco che ti porti dentro