Pyromaniac (Erik Skjoldbjærg 2016) |Norway

by Finso Gyaltsen, viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (Feb. 2017)

Pyromaniac is a Norwegian drama that revolves around a small town in Norway, where a 19 year old who has recently returned home starts setting things on fire. The young man doesn’t have much to do in rural Norway and seems to be in search for something to pass his time,  he also looks to have trouble making friends and doesn’t really seem to have a purpose.

Pyromaniac opens with an elderly couple expectedly waking up to their house being targeted to be burnt down by an arsonist. We then come to see a small rural town in Norway that has slowly come to be targeted by an arsonist through multiple fires across the town. This is an unusual occurrence in these parts which has people stumped, leading them to think it might be an out of towner causing these fires. The fires though, have been coinciding with the return of a young man named Dag who returned home after military service. Dag’s father is the local fire chief of the volunteer based fire brigade, and it becomes his duty to put out fires that have been raging across town. We come to think his actions are a misguided attempt to recreate past memories from his youth, when it was sort of a custom for Dag to join his dad on his fire extinguishing endeavors whenever a fire broke out. However these fires keep breaking out, and Dags father has now become to old to keep fire-fighting. Everyone is perplexed leading this small town to appear on the news and have national police appear on the scene.

The movies shows that deeper problems may lie that are to blame for Dags behavior but it is not really addressed, leaving us viewers to assume so and so. This movie has two ways of drawing you in, first – we want to know who is starting these fires, and second – we want to know why? Neither of these questions have fully satisfying answers, yet the movie still holds you gripped while you wonder and thats why I give The Pyromaniac a 3/5 on my much acclaimed movie rating system.