Oliver Laxe’s drama about a fire-starter in rural
Spain is visually arresting but exasperating as a piece of storytelling
It is certainly an ominous title for a movie about a convicted pyromaniac being released from
prison and allowed home to live with his mother. Oliver Laxe’s Fire Will Come is a sombre but lovely looking film that makes its own kind of higher sense in the context of climate change – an award winner in the Un Certain Regard at last year’s Cannes. But, as before with this director, I find myself admiring his visual and compositional sense, while being a bit exasperated by the provisional and coyly non-committal nature of his storytelling.
Amador (played by non-professional Amador Arias) is the guy whom we see leaving jail, with officials muttering over his hefty official file and the wildfire he was notoriously found to have set in the hills some years back. He returns to live with his elderly mother, Benedicta (played by Benedicta Sánchez, also a non-professional), in Galicia in north-west Spain, and help her on her tiny smallholding with three cows.