The Macaluso sisters are a handful. Their rage and sorrow form the lava core of Emma Dante’s intense, punishing film, which follows five, then four siblings from a fateful childhood day through a harsh old age, tearing through the Italian landscape like an extra-volatile sirocco. Some viewers may connect with its intensity; others may back away feeling browbeaten. This is a movie that doesn’t give you much space to decide.

The film unfolds in three distinct chapters. The first one establishes Maria (Eleonora De Luca), Pinuccia (Anita Pomario), Lia (Susanna Piraino), Katia (Alissa Maria Orlando), and Antonella (Viola Pusateri), orphaned sisters ranging from age 18 to about six who live on the top floor of a crumbling apartment building in 1980s Palermo. They are not alone, though. They share close quarters with pigeons they rent out for festive occasions, a few of the birds dyed a weird shade of pink. Pigeons and doves trapped in captivity form a motif for the inner lives of the sisters throughout.

In depicting the girls’ relationships, Dante outweighs scenes of rough affection with excessive melees of screaming, cursing, and slapping. On a sun-dappled afternoon, the girls sneak into a beach club for a swim. Maria, the eldest, sneaks away to meet another girl, to whom she confesses her desire to become a dancer and with whom she exchanges romantic kisses. It will be Maria’s last carefree day; she returns to the beach to an unseen tragedy, a scene the film will revisit later.

With a new set of actors taking on the roles, Dante catches up to the sisters in grievous middle age. Maria has long given up her dreams of dancing, except to throw out a few Martha Graham moves when no one’s looking. She now works in a foul-smelling lab full of dead animals. Pinuccia still lives in the apartment, tormented by her sister Lia, who appears to have a mental illness. When Pinuccia has wild sex with her boyfriend, she deals with Lia by locking her out of the house, where Lia howls and bangs on the door. Married with a child, Katia seems the most settled, but her husband nags her to force Pinuccia to sell the home and split the proceeds.

All of these women have grown up anguished with each other and themselves, and the film treats us to more punches, shrieks, insults, and theatrical grandstanding—the film is based on a play, and it shows here in set pieces confined to the apartment and in a raging argument over the youngest sister’s unresolved death. Dante revels in the joy and shame of the body. Lurid sounds of bedroom athletics (imitated even more luridly later by Lia), close-ups of scissors snipping bloody animal entrails, and a scene where Maria slobbers as she stuffs her face with cream cakes take excesses to the limit.

The final chapter is the bluntest and also the most lyrical. Now alone, Lia dismantles the house. The undoing is a fitting end to a story of anger and grief. But poetic flashbacks to the death of Antonella reintroduce sunshine and companionship—the moments before darkness took over. It’s here that we understand better what the sisters lost. 

The Macaluso Sisters has a heartful of misery. At its most affecting, it draws you in not with the shouting but in the few interludes when it’s standing still.