Morgan Gruer’s Fire at Will, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival 2025, takes the familiar family dinner scene and detonates it into pure mayhem. Four grown-up children gather at their parents’ table, expecting a meal, only to be met with a startling declaration. The family will is about to be discussed. A notary is already on the way. Cue the egos, cue the chaos.
Gruer creates an atmosphere that is instantly combustible. A family dynamic that feels all too familiar. It’s a role as old as time: the patriarch (Scott Cohen) presides with pragmatic detachment, “handling business,” while the mother (Amy Stiller) simmers with resentment in the kitchen, weaponizing her exhaustion against her ungrateful children.
The siblings, one of them a triplet, tear into one another like a pack of hyenas, speaking over each other and firing off snarky remarks. Watching the scene unfold feels like a stress test for the senses. Conversations overlap and accusations fly across the table. Jared Levy’s camera is merciless in its precision, shooting from face to face as if tracking a brutal game of verbal ping pong. The result is claustrophobic, suffocating, and very entertaining.
If this sounds overwhelming, that’s precisely the point. In just ten minutes, Gruer condenses what could have been a civilised conversation among adults into a comedic frenzy, evoking The Bear’s infamous “Seven Fishes” episode but stripped down into one big crescendo. No sound design in the world is needed other than the sharp clattering of cutlery and a TV that’s definitely too loud.
What lingers, however, is not simply the shouting but the silence that follows. One by one, the children abandon the table, distracted by other more important commitments. All except the artist daughter, Maggie (Rebecca Gever), the allegedly volatile one, who is also part of the triplet. She has been excluded from being named an executor of the will. It’s a point Gruer wants to make: art, as ever, is dismissed, excluded from “serious” family business. She doesn’t shout this critique, but it lands all the same.
Fire at Will is a sharp, suffocating cacophony of interruptions and unspoken grievances. Gruer transforms the banal setting of dinner into a battleground of generational angst and patriarchal habits that refuse to fade. Chicken is served with a side of truth, and it is not easy to digest.
