Afire
Janus Film | Release Date: July 14, 2023 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
82
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 28 Critic Reviews
Positive:
26
Mixed:
1
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangJul 13, 2023
Throughout this movie, an absorbing, barbed and frequently funny evisceration of artistic ego, Petzold practices a deft and disarming sleight of hand, using key details to keep the viewer off balance and deliver a stinging rebuke to Leon’s myopia. Read full review
100
Original-CinLiam LaceyJul 12, 2023
On an obvious level, it’s a character study of the artist as an insufferable young prig, a type that, as Petzold no doubt knows, is familiar to the point of cliché. But as the film unfolds, and boldly shifts tone, the character suggests the larger theme of struggling to stay humane in a broken world. Read full review
100
VarietyGuy LodgeFeb 24, 2023
It’s the film’s great, disorienting structural risks, its humoring of human untidiness and confusion, that make it so subtly thrilling and moving. Read full review
100
The PlaylistSavina PetkovaFeb 24, 2023
Afire is the uncompromising work of a master not only on conceptual and stylistic levels but also in terms of his emotional politics. Read full review
90
Little White LiesMarina AshiotiAug 23, 2023
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. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisJul 13, 2023
The German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s spiky and at times mordantly funny Afire is a tonic for moviegoers tired of nice, squishable, likable, relatable dull and dull characters. Read full review
90
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzJul 13, 2023
The dramedy of manners is as rich and rewarding an experience as any of Petzold’s more ambitious films. Afire arrives like a calm wind, and leaves with everything and everyone perfectly scorched. Read full review
90
The Daily BeastNick SchagerJul 11, 2023
Another [Petzold] masterwork about characters who are trapped by internal and external circumstances from which they find it intensely difficult to escape. Read full review
90
Screen DailyJonathan RomneyFeb 24, 2023
While, on one level, it seems to belong to international cinema’s increasingly prevalent strain of climate catastrophe dramas, on another it’s a brittle character piece, a comedy of social embarrassment with a dark and ultimately tragic undertow. Until, that is, a coda ties it off in another register entirely. Read full review
89
TheWrapTomris LafflyJul 15, 2023
Few movies this year will be as quietly sizzling as German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s “Afire,” a novelistic and sophisticated character study that kindles inside a chamber piece, as languid as a relaxed summer day and as heartbreaking as the end of a short-lived summer love. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyJul 14, 2023
Like all of Petzold’s recent pictures, Afire draws you in confidently and prepares its knockout emotional punch with scrupulousness and a vivid sense of surprise. Read full review
88
Slant MagazinePat BrownFeb 26, 2023
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. Read full review
83
ColliderMarco Vito OddoFeb 24, 2023
Sure, Afire's message of the inevitability of death and the absolute need to embrace life can be a little on the nose. Still, Petzold puts his own spin on the old message, by inviting the audience to laugh and cry as four lives get intertwined in a very honest and human way. Read full review
83
The Film StageRory O'ConnorFeb 24, 2023
Petzold’s latest, Afire, unfurls with all the page-turning seduction of a gripping novella. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesTara BradyAug 25, 2023
Christian Petzold, the film’s writer as well as director, rightly took home Berlin’s Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize for this genre-defying comedy of manners. The German master deftly weaves ecological catastrophe, sexual capering and a portrait of beta masculinity into a plot that, at first glance, could be a holiday-from-hell sitcom episode. Read full review
80
CineVueChristopher MachellAug 24, 2023
German director Christian Petzold’s latest is a tense, emotionally fraught drama, layered with smouldering internal conflict that by its incendiary close invariably catches alight. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreJul 14, 2023
Seriousness does eventually descend on Afire like the check at the end of a meal, but until then the film, the latest feature from German filmmaker Christian Petzold, is a beguilingly funny affair about getting in your own way. Read full review
80
SlashfilmRyan ColemanJul 14, 2023
It's a classical fable or a postmodern story within a story. Triumphant or deeply nihilistic — or both. The second in his planned "elements" trilogy, "Afire" will be difficult to top. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyFeb 24, 2023
The modulation in the final stretch from extreme sorrow to regeneration and then a possibility of reconnection in the open ending is lovely. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleJosh KupeckiJul 26, 2023
Buoyed by pitch-perfect performances from the cast (Schubert especially nails the insufferably delicate masculinity of Leon), the film balances its humor and pathos with a natural ease, ending with a satisfying conclusion. All qualities of any good story. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn HornadayJul 25, 2023
Richly observed and paced with relaxed, unforced ease, Afire doesn’t ignite as much as smolder. It’s a slow, steady burn. Read full review
75
The Associated PressLindsey BahrJul 20, 2023
Fire is in the air this summer, literally, and at the movies. Though the flames in German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s Afire aren’t of the nuclear variety, the smoke from his tension-filled chamber piece about a few young adults at a vacation house near the Baltic Sea certainly gets in your eyes. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreJul 12, 2023
Afire is a dry, downbeat character study for the first two acts and a film that turns to melodrama — the fire upon them — for the third. Read full review
72
Paste MagazineJacob OllerJul 14, 2023
The careful control displayed throughout Afire allows its deep, elegant characterizations to persist through the narrative smog, long after the rest of the film burns away. Read full review
70
IGNA.A. DowdJul 14, 2023
In its portrait of a perennially prickly novelist (Thomas Schubert), it gets at tough and sometimes funny truths about the nature of writers. Read full review
67
IndieWireBen CrollFeb 24, 2023
Afire doesn’t have that much story to tell or cards to turn over. When it does run out of reveals, we’re left with a character too thick to catch up and an approach that begins to double itself. Read full review
40
The GuardianPeter BradshawFeb 24, 2023
In the end I felt that the film fully achieves neither the ostensible comedy of the opening, nor the supposed sadness of its denouement. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChronicleG. Allen JohnsonAug 3, 2023
Petzold said he conceived of the film during the pandemic lockdown — that makes sense, considering the sparseness of the setting and small cast — and was inspired by the character studies of French filmmaker Éric Rohmer and Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Unfortunately, he needed inspiration from another great artist: Christian Petzold. Read full review
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