Firebreak

A family is mid-move, boxes everywhere, when little Lide slips away into the trees, and then the forest starts to burn. That is the entire engine of this survival drama, and it needs nothing more: a mother, a shrinking window, and a landscape turning against her by the minute. The register stays intimate rather than spectacular, treating the fire less as disaster-movie scale than as a parent's terrible arithmetic of distance, wind and time remaining.

Viewers who prefer dread to pyrotechnics will be well served, since the tension here comes from proximity and helplessness rather than from set pieces. The pacing tightens steadily across its hour and three-quarters, and the film trusts silence and open ground to do much of the work. Anyone drawn to lean, nerve-jangling stories about ordinary people pushed past their limits should queue it up, preferably on a night when you do not mind clutching the arm of the sofa.