Firebreak

Belén Cuesta spends most of Firebreak running. Her character, Mara, is a widow who has brought her young daughter to the family's summer house in rural Spain to pack it up. The plan is a fresh start. The reality is boxes, grief, and a child who slips out of sight. When Lide disappears into the woods, a wildfire breaks out almost at the same moment, and the film becomes a race measured in wind shifts and ember showers.

Director David Victori, working from a script he wrote with Javier Echániz, Asier Guerricaechevarría, and Jon Iriarte, keeps the camera close to the people rather than the spectacle. The fire is a pressure cooker, not a showpiece. Cuesta, a Goya winner for The Endless Trench, anchors the film opposite newcomer Candela Martínez as Lide, with Enric Auquer, Joaquín Furriel, Diana Gómez, and Mika Arias filling out a cast of locals and officials whose motives grow harder to read as the smoke thickens.

Netflix released the film on February 19, 2026. It runs 1 hour 47 minutes and carries an R rating. Espotlight produced, with Anxo Rodríguez and Ferran Tomàs producing, Federico Jusid composing the score, and Elías M. Félix handling cinematography. The title refers to a gap cut through vegetation to stop a fire's spread, a metaphor the story leans on without ever underlining it. [edit]

Mara arrives at the house with her daughter Lide and a plan to empty it. The place is a summer home in a wooded stretch of Spain, and the reason for the trip is not a happy one: Mara's husband has died, and the house holds too much of him to keep. Packing is slow. Lide wanders. The film takes its time establishing the rhythm of a mother and child in a space that feels both familiar and wrong, and then it breaks that rhythm.

Lide disappears into the trees. Almost simultaneously, a fire starts somewhere nearby and moves fast. The sky turns. Mara's search begins in a landscape she does not fully know, and the film quickly establishes that the official response will not save her: the Civil Guard arrives, the bureaucracy grinds, and the fire outpaces all of it. Sargento Revuelta and Cabo Baranda represent that response, and they are not villains, just slow.

The middle of the film tightens around a series of choices. Santiago, a local man played by Enric Auquer, inserts himself into the search. His help is useful. His presence is not entirely comfortable. Mara has to decide whether to trust him, whether to follow instructions from people who do not understand the terrain, and how much of what she is being told about her daughter's disappearance she can believe. Luis and Elena, played by Joaquín Furriel and Diana Gómez, are adults drawn into the crisis, and Dani, a younger character played by Mika Arias, is connected to the search in ways that keep shifting.

Victori and his co-writers build suspicion around more than one person. The film is less interested in the fire as a visual effect than as a machine that strips away options. Roads close. Phone signals fail. The people who should be helping become another variable to manage. By the time Mara realizes that the danger to her daughter may not be only the blaze, the film has already planted the evidence in plain sight, and the search becomes something else entirely.[edit]