Cortafuego: when fire burns inside and out

Mara, a recent widow, travels with her daughter Lide, her brother-in-law Luis, and his family to the country house in the woods, which she owned with her late husband, to begin the process of selling it. When ash falls from above and news reports announce a huge fire devastating acres and acres of forest in the region, the protagonists of Cortafuego realize it's time to leave before the fire gets any closer.

But Mara realizes that Lide has vanished into thin air, and after futile searches in the surroundings, there's nothing left to do but notify the authorities. However, the authorities soon have to interrupt operations due to the fire, which is now increasingly insidious and out of control, forcing the distraught mother and her in-laws to ask for help from the game warden Santiago, the last person to have seen the little girl before her disappearance. 

Not just trees are burning

What begins as a rescue mission during a natural emergency with potentially catastrophic consequences progressively transforms into a tense psychological battle, showing us how unspoken truths and extreme fears can radically transform individuals when pushed to their limits. The screenplay manages not to fully reveal its cards until the epilogue, finding the right level of tension to keep the audience's interest high, amidst red herrings and plot twists ready to dismantle potential certainties.

David Victori - a Spanish director who had already made a name for himself with the unsettling No Matarás (Cross the Line) (2020) starring Mario Casas and Milena Smit - orchestrates this immediate burn-out situation with a certain skill, igniting the shadow of suspicion in a context already made severely prohibitive by the advancing smoke and flames. An infernal backdrop that adds further insights to what might already appear as a Dantesque circle, where desperation pushes even mild individuals to "lose their minds," blinded by terror and anxiety of losing their dearest ones. 
The revelation relies on solutions that are certainly not new, but the lack of actual originality is compensated by the character development and the performances of a cast ready to immerse themselves with the right attitude in their respective roles.

Belén Cuesta, winner of the Goya Award for the remarkable historical drama The Endless Trench (2019), imbues the right dramatic density into this mother already tested by recent grief, now grappling with a developing tragedy to be avoided at all costs. Joaquín Furriel, in the role of Luis, gives character and ambiguity to the brother-in-law ready for anything, while the figure of Santiago - played by Enric Auquer - is probably the most successful, capable of evoking the correct nuances in a key element of the story.

Tell me the truth

The mid-viewing twist "changes the skin" of the film, with the dualism no longer just nature against man, but also man against man, giving rise to interesting parallels that make that devastating fire worthy of unexpected metaphorical propensities. The lurking danger further fragments the narrative microcosm, becoming a mirror of a broader contemporary world, where it takes little or nothing to erode trust, and the difference between allies and enemies is in the blink of an eye. The result of manipulation that social networks and conspiracy theories have increased in the population, and which here finds itself grappling with a situation that is partly archetypal, but elsewhere derives precisely from a world where "trust is good, but not trusting is better".

A game of paranoia, which even more than the fire burns the bonds between the protagonists, setting them on a path whose way back becomes more distant minute by minute, except to leave at least a jolt of hope in that epilogue where accounts may perhaps be settled again for a peaceful life, for that cathartic moving forward that was widely demanded from the outset. And which Cortafuego, like it or not, could not deny itself.