The Fires

Bluesky

The Fires (Eldarnir), based on the book by Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir, is a low key Icelandic disaster movie. It follows the tried and tested plot for this kind of thing. Anna Vigdís (Hrefna Pálsdóttir) is a volcanologist at a university in Iceland. After an unusually large earthquake near the Reykjanes Peninsula she becomes concerned about the possibility of a large volcanic eruption. The authorities are not too pleased and try to downplay the danger. It is a formula that has been ubiquitous in movies since Jaws.

What director Ugla Hauksdóttir does with The Fires is the same but different. The film opens with a shot of a white flower, the first green colonist of a lava floe. Anna as a child (Karólina Pálmadóttir) is lying on the basalt watching it. There is a tremor and her father (Ingvar Sigurdsson), a geologist, is killed as a fissure open up. The volcano is established not just as a force of destruction but of renewal.

Where once there was a quake off the shore there is now an undersea eruption. A plume of volcanic ash billows into the sky. The authorities agree that further investigation may be required. Their intransigence is not the testosterone-fulled histrionics of Hollywood. It is more the jaded council committee that has to deal with geological disturbances and late bin collection. Investigations are costly, evacuations difficult, and what effect will it have on tourism? The film cuts to hundreds of tourists volcano watching at a second eruption site, taking selfies with the lava floe.

Inveigling his way onto a helicopter flight carrying the scientists is a freelance photographer, Thomas (Pilou Asbæk). Somewhat underfoot, he becomes infatuated with Anna and starts to insert himself into her life. Ugla is happily married to her husband, Kristinn (Joi Johannsson), with whom she has a daughter, Slack (Steinunn Kaldal Jakobsdóttir). The movement of magma beneath the surface becomes a metaphor for sexual desire and the disastrous eruption for family break-up.

What Sigríður, Markus Englmair, and Ugla have done as writers and writer/director is hang a disaster movie on top of a family drama. That is what makes the film compelling. There is enough in the family drama to be a film in and of itself. Having that inside the spectacle makes it meaningful in a way that special effects and eye candy don't do on their own. It's not overblown or polemic but there is a strongly present female gaze throughout Ugla's film: the slightly patronising or condescending tones from some of Anna's male colleagues; Thomas's pushiness and entitlement; the quiet expectation about work/family balance; and sometimes just the angle at which scenes are shot. It is reminiscent of Woman At War.

Ugla is also really good at directing action and has an eye for the dazzling image. That combined with an emotional core makes The Fires something more than one shot eye candy.

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