Critics reviews

[A] film that employs far more humour than perhaps any of the director’s previous work, but in Petzold’s masterly hands, gravity and comedy work in easy and thrilling harmony.

It’s a slow burn for a film that features the backdrop of a forest fire, yet one is wrapped up in the dynamics of these individuals in ways that at once feel shockingly intimate yet depressingly familiar.

Afire builds a story that begins as a hangout comedy with a sad-sack at its center but gradually becomes a slow-motion conflagration that offers no easy answers.

This one feels fresh and vital, owing a large part of its novelty to the throbbing quartet of actors who fuel and contrast with one another... His characters live and breathe, but they truly come alive in their relationships...

While the film works as an entertaining narrative, the unsympathetic lead (played by Austrian Thomas Schubert) somewhat hinders any emotional engagement.

Afire culminates in a magnificent and poetic study of subjectivity, exploring the isolated anxieties of creative labour and a simultaneous entanglement of superiority and inferiority complexes, adding another compelling and precise layer of texture to Petzold’s multifaceted oeuvre.

Thematically and politically, “Afire” is less rigidly conceived than much of the German auteur’s recent work, though it shouldn’t be mistaken for a slight diversion.

[A] film that’s arguably lighter Petzold than usual, but still bears the unmistakeable stamp of his intellectual and conceptual elegance.

Christian Petzold['s]... new movie is an odd, quibbling tragicomedy with perhaps a little of Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, avowedly intended as the second part of a trilogy about creativity and love (the first being Undine).

In Afire, Petzold scatters his literary references like a breadcrumb trail (Heinrich Heine’s Romanzero here, Uwe Johnson’s The third book about Achim there) yet, like the architectural curios in Undine, understanding their deeper meanings is purely optional.

Leaving behind the fairy-tale enigma of his last film, Undine, Christian Petzold returns in Afire to the unembellished realism more characteristic of his work, even when he has flirted with genre, from noir to melodrama to Hitchcockian thriller.

The concept is both strong and thin. At first, this drip-drop of story beats allows for a number of delicious payoffs, setting up many punchlines too delicious to share here. But overall, “Afire” doesn’t have that much story to tell or cards to turn over.