103 min | NR | July 14, 2023 | Sideshow / Janus Films
A blocked novelist holes up at a seaside house to finish his book and finds it already full of people who refuse to leave him to his misery. A wildfire creeps closer while he sulks. Christian Petzold makes self-pity look like the most dangerous thing in the woods.
Leon is a novelist working on a second book that is not going well. He travels to a family vacation house near the Baltic coast with his friend Felix to work and to escape. The house is already occupied by Nadja, a woman Leon has never met and immediately resents. A wildfire burns somewhere beyond the trees and moves closer each day. Christian Petzold builds the film around a man so consumed by his own failure that he cannot see the people in front of him or the danger at his back. Afire is a portrait of an artist whose self-pity becomes a kind of blindness.
Thomas Schubert plays Leon with a sour, defensive stillness that makes the character hard to like and impossible to look away from. He sulks at the dinner table and refuses help and mistakes his own paralysis for depth. Paula Beer plays Nadja with warmth and a quick intelligence that Leon keeps underestimating. She moves through the house with ease while he stews, and Beer lets you see the secret she carries before the script reveals it. Langston Uibel plays Felix as the open, generous counterweight to Leon’s withdrawal. Enno Trebs as the lifeguard Devid and Matthias Brandt as the publisher Helmut fill out a household that Leon treats as an audience rather than a group of people.
Petzold writes and directs with a control that hides how much is happening underneath. The camera stays patient and observational, holding on faces and the ordinary business of a summer house while the threat stays offscreen. The fire is rarely shown. It arrives as smoke on the horizon, as ash on a car, as a red glow that turns the night sky the color of an open wound. The sound design keeps the sea and the wind close and the sirens distant until distance stops being safe. Petzold trusts the gap between what Leon notices and what the audience notices to do the dramatic work.
The film tightens steadily as the comedy of manners gives way to something graver. Leon spends the summer convinced he is the most interesting person present and the most aggrieved. Everyone around him is living while he performs the role of the suffering writer. Petzold lets the consequences of that self-absorption land late and hard. Afire is about the cost of refusing to pay attention, and it makes that refusal feel like a moral failure rather than a quirk.