Afire

After the watery Undine came Afire (2023), the second film in Christian Petzold's loose elemental trilogy. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale and confirmed the German director as one of the surest voices in contemporary European cinema. His earlier work leaned on history and genre. This is a lighter, sun-struck thing, a summer chamber piece with catastrophe creeping in at its edges.

Thomas Schubert plays Leon, a prickly, blocked writer whose self-regard blinds him to the people around him, and Paula Beer, Petzold's new muse, is the elusive Nadja, who upends his retreat. Petzold shoots the Baltic light and the loosening rhythms of a holiday with deceptive ease, letting comedy, eroticism and dread seep in by degrees as smoke gathers on the horizon. It is a comedy of male obtuseness, and it is also thinking hard about art, attention and mortality.

Many critics counted it among Petzold's finest, praising Beer's luminous performance and the film's control of tone; it appeared on many best-of-year lists and deepened a director-actor partnership already central to German cinema. Wry and sensual, Afire finds the apocalyptic in the everyday, and it shows that Petzold can be as piercing in a sunlit comic register as in the haunted dramas that made his name. Schubert and Beer both went on to wider international recognition, and Petzold showed he could fold dread, comedy and longing into one deceptively simple summer.