Firebreak (now streaming on Netflix) drops another piece of kindling on the assertion that wildfires seem to be the next disaster-movie scenario du jour. This Spanish thriller deposits a family in the middle of a forest so a little girl can get lost among vast swaths of dry, brown ferns so everyone can freak out once the flames start licking the sky and ash falls like snow and smoke tries to choke everyone out like it’s a jiu-jitsu champ. Notably, the title of the film refers to a strip of land where the trees have been removed in order to slow down or prevent the spread of wildfires – but once you start to wonder if that’s going to be the subtle variation a standard survival movie needs, Firebreak tries to be another totally different movie. And frankly, it doesn’t work.
FIREBREAK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Fzzzt. Spzztzz. Uh oh. A CGI spark drops off a CGI electrical tower and lands in the CGI weeds and CGI flames start to engulf a CGI forest. Don’t worry, this is as flat-out terrible as the movie will look, but at least it’s safer than lighting a real fire. Cut to: A minivan motoring into the woods. It’s full of Grieving People, because Non-grieving People are less interesting characters. Mara (Belen Cuesta) and her young daughter LIDE! LIDE! LIDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! (Candela Martinez) – because that’s how she’s most often referred to in this movie – used to call this fancy modern house in the woods their home but they sold it because, as the little girl exposits, “This is where Dad died.” They’re here to pack their belongings, with the help of Mara’s brother-in-law Luis (Joaquin Furriel), his wife Elena (Diana Gomez) and their son Dani (Mika Arias). Brace yourself for all kinds of longing, lingering shots of people frowning at photographs of long-gone halcyon mom-dad-daughter happy times, then sadly placing them into cardboard boxes.
There’s one other home down this winding path, and it belongs to friendly neighbor guy Santiago (Enric Auquer), and we don’t catch his last name, but we’ll eventually assume it’s either Redherring or Plotdevice. He’s sweet enough to stop by and give LIDE! LIDE! LIDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! a little gift. Hold that thought for a moment, because they’re eating dinner when they notice something falling from the sky: Ash. Time to quickly get all their stuff packed up and get outta there. LIDE! LIDE! LIDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! wants to go “say goodbye” to the little hut in the woods where she and her dad used to play, but Mara wisely says no. The forest fire is raging and they don’t have time and the kid gets mad and they yell at each other and LIDE! LIDE! LIDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! storms out. Of course, everyone is so preoccupied with the task at hand that they don’t notice the girl when she slips out and wanders down the incredibly flammable path to the hut by herself.
Also of course, no one notices she’s missing until they’re ready to vamoose. This is when the shouting of LIDE! LIDE! LIDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! quickly gets out of hand. They call the cops, and they start a search party and insist that Mara and everyone get out of dodge before they look like the handful of blackened potato chips you get in every bag – but Mara ain’t leaving. Can you blame her? Mommy instincts don’t allow one to kowtow to danger. And then the cops call off the search because the winds shifted or something, so Mara and co. get Santiago to help them search. Santiago shouts for a while but then soon starts acting like he’s got squirrels in his jockey shorts. Is he hiding something? Something more than the fact that he holds psilocybin rituals in the woods to help people overcome their fear of death? Like LIDE! LIDE! LIDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!’s bracelet hanging on the stickshifter of his Jeep? What makes him more suspicious, that fact or his wildly erratic behavior? And what’s scarier, an out-of-control blaze or circumstantial evidence that the guy next door is a serial killer?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Wildfire movies of note: The Lost Bus, Only the Brave and Those Who Wish Me Dead.
Performance Worth Watching: A scenario as old as time itself: Cuesta is an old pro trapped in a dumb screenplay. Watch her in The Endless Trench instead.
Sex And Skin: This movie has the wrong kind of hot, so, none.
Our Take: At the very least, Firebreak will test your tolerance for having your chain yanked. It’s a classic idiot plot where a sentence or three would significantly simplify the scenario, but also cut the run time well below the standard for feature-length films. And so four screenwriters, who each seem to have a different idea of what the movie should be, drop 45 minutes of screaming hysteria into the middle of the narrative, and you’ll be lucky if you get through 15 of those minutes without washing down a handful of Excedrin with some whiskey. The movie does this to draw out suspense, but instead of marveling at the intensity, you might just scream with frustration. Mara, Santiago and their pals don’t function as human beings, mostly because they’re not human beings at all, but Movie Characters dangling from the puppet strings of a plot that has us watching the final flurry of sweaty action in slackjawed confusion, because it plays out like several pages of the script went missing, and the filmmakers just shrugged and shot what they had.
Granted, the film is reasonably well-directed by David Victori, who ably aims to nurture a degree of tension as the fire spreads and the little girl remains lost. But he and his fellow writers force our protagonists into a test of their morality while in the midst of a pressure-packed race against time. It seems like an attempt to add a layer of thematic complication to a movie that’s already tacking survivalism on top of grief and loss. Which, come to think of it, is the great new cliche from filmmakers, who apparently believe that people must be grieving in order to have agency in dramas like this. It seems like 80 percent of all movies made in the last five years have been about grief and loss, loss and grief or grievous loss. There is seemingly no other way for a movie to convey complex emotions unless its characters are silently weeping in the wake of death.
I digress. Firebreak doesn’t aim to be standard survivalist fare, but its attempt to tweak the formula is maddening. It wants to draw us in and hold us in suspense, but that suspense merely irritates because it’s couched within a different kind of -ense, namely, nonsense. Logic and reason elude these characters. The film also exploits the age-old Radio, Flashlight and Cell Phone Rule, which dictates that none of them function properly when characters need them most. If you watch this movie, you may wish your streaming device would follow suit.
Our Call: Firebreak drove me crazy. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.