Firebreak (Cortafuego), the Spanish-language thriller from Netflix, opens with the beginning of a wildfire – quick, accidental, and all-consuming. In a way, it’s a metaphor for all that follows over the next 90 minutes.
The film begins with the aftermath of a tragedy. After the death of her husband, Mara (Bélen Cuesta) returns to her family’s woodsy vacation home to pack it up. Her eight-year-old daughter, Lide (Candela Martinez), is crushed that her mother wants to sell the house and pleads to keep it. Meanwhile, Mara’s brother-in-law, Luis (Joaquín Furriel), his wife, Elena (Diana Gómez), and their son, Dani (Mika Arias), are on hand to help with the packing.
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Kindly neighbor Santiago (Enric Auquer) drops in with a gift for grieving Lide. The light, airy house is heavy with grief and once-happy memories of Mara’s family before her husband’s death. But it’s only the beginning of the worst day of Mara’s life.
A parents worst nightmare unfolds in Firebreak.
Deep in the forest, a fire starts, and evacuation is recommended. Everyone, moving gently in their grief, begins packing up everything that made the house a home – Mara’s husband’s woodcarvings, family pictures, treasured items. And in the middle of the chaos, someone notices Lide is missing.
Firebreak posits its premise on the idea of searching for a missing child during a natural disaster – a parent’s worst nightmare exponentially increased. At first, the film feels like a race against time, progressing nearly in real time as Mara, Luis, and the rest of the family search the house, the car, the woods for Lide. The police are called, but the threat of the fire looms too strongly to give the investigation the time Mara desperately needs. It’s a chilling, thrilling premise for a film, and sets the stakes higher than your average disaster film – but that’s where it evolves into something else.
It’s here that Firebreak shifts from disaster film to psychological thriller. Blame for Lide’s disappearance shifts, leading Mara to wonder if Lide wasn’t lost, but was forcibly taken away. When Santiago offers to help search for Lide, Mara wonders whether his help is distracting from the search for her.
The film focuses on human nature, transforming into a psychological thriller.
Mara’s suspicions of Santiago’s actions take center stage. Here, the writers, including co-writer/director David Victori, nearly lose the tension built from its premise entirely. The fire seems nonexistent in the second act as Firebreak seems more interested in being a rehash of Prisoners than in being about a natural disaster.
The tension is palpable as Mara interrogates the elusive Santiago, but loses all sense of what made the film initially tense. At times, the wildfire feels like Chekhov’s gun, presented early in the film so that when it eventually reappears, it’s a reminder that this film was once about a little girl lost in a wildfire.
When the wildfire returns to conveniently pose a threat to the characters, Elías M. Félix’s cinematography captures the suffocating nature of a forest aflame. It’s a beautiful, destructive thing to behold.
Bélen Cuesta, Joaquín Furriel, and Enric Auquer elevate the sometimes uneven material.
Cuesta, Furriel, and Auquer are splendid actors, making their performances multilayered in a story that demands there be no heroes or villains, just people desperate for the truth. There’s a sense of horror to the way their characters interact, all in search of what really happened to Lide and unable to truly convince each other of the events as they see them.
A good neighbor and a once-happy family devolve into people acting at their worst in a desperate moment, creating devastating consequences for all. They’re up to the challenge when the film demands it most. Gómez is given less to do than the rest of her costars, but is a good asset to the ensemble, with Elena becoming the sole voice of rationale amid everyone else’s descent into madness.
While it’s a solid little thriller, its premise and title do a disservice to what actually unfolds. Firebreak presents itself as a race against time, but does very little with that idea until its third act. It’s less about natural disasters than it is about human nature itself. But when time is of the essence, Firebreak is heart-pounding and fiery to the core.
Firebreak is available now exclusively on Netflix.
Firebreak
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Rating - 7/107/10
TL;DR
Firebreak presents itself as a race against time, but does very little with that idea until its third act. But when time is of the essence, Firebreak is heart-pounding and fiery to the core.
