Sometimes, the buzz and gossip surrounding a celebrity gets so loud that you can’t hear anything that’s going on around them. If Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie decided to make Mr. and Mrs. Smith 2 in 2023, you can bet that the majority of the questions surrounding the project wouldn’t have much to do with the project itself.
Similarly, Amber Heard’s return to the big screen in In the Fire after a years-long break hasn’t made most prospective audience members think “I wonder what it was about the script that interested her.” It’s a lot easier to hear that the Teen Choice Award nominee is headed back to cinemas and inadvertently fall down a rabbit hole of tabloid stories, streaming documentaries, court transcripts, PSAs about bringing dogs to Australia, and social media reactions revolving around her life and times.
Not today, though. Today, we focus up, put out pop culture blinders on, and really zero in on what In the Fire is all about, with zero distractions, I.E.: whether or not Jason Momoa dressed like Johnny Depp on the set of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom as sort of an A-list psy-op.
So what is In the Fire about?
Distributed via the throw-it-all-at-the-wall mentality of Saban Films, In the Fire follows turn-of-the-century doctor Grace Burnham to the fields of a Colombian plantation. There, she attempts to treat a boy with peculiar and unearthly abilities, inadvertently stirring up a 19th-century culture war. Is the boy gifted with extraordinary powers thanks to science? Is he possessed by dark forces? The stakes get higher as a litany of biblical plagues rains down on the community, from locusts to failing crops, with the citizens blaming the child for their misfortune. In addition to Heard, it stars Eduardo Noriega of The Last Stand as Don Marquez, relative newcomer Lorenzo Zaini as the troubled but gifted youngster Martin Marquez, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s Luca Calvani as Father Antonio.
Helmed by No Man’s Land director Conor Allyn and co-written by Allyn, Pascal Borno, and Silvio Muraglia, In the Fire, described by Heard in The Hollywood Reporter as “a meditation on the almost supernatural powers of love told through a strong-willed and independent woman at the turn of the 20th century,” is currently scheduled to hit theaters on October 13, 2023. Despite only having played publicly once during its June premiere at the Taormina Film Festival in Italy, the film currently boasts over 150 US-based one-star ratings on IMDb, a fact that probably has nothing to do with that stuff from earlier about people getting all mouth-foamy over celebrity gossip.