Antonio, who fled Naples many years ago, has built a family and a successful career in Milan, far from his mother Angela — a woman excessive in both her virtues and her flaws, irresistible, old-fashioned and hostile like few others — who has come to visit for Christmas and seems determined to stay. Christmas Eve dinner becomes an emotional battlefield, at once comic and fierce, bringing to the surface a past of impositions and misunderstandings. With a stubborn capon that refuses to end up in the pot, a daughter whose arrival remains uncertain, and an unexpected distinguished guest, the evening turns into a reckoning between mother and son destined to change the meaning of their bond forever: a love that burns like a fire within, one that never dies out — not even by leaving.
