"The Fires" turns Iceland into a disaster set, and the country's tourism board into its first investor

A fissure tears through a glacier somewhere south of Vatnajökull, and within four minutes of screen-time the molten runoff has begun eating its way toward the outskirts of Reykjavik. Released in UK cinemas on 21 July 2026, The Fires treats Iceland less as scenery than as a fully deputised co-star: the basalt cliffs, the geothermal vents, the impermanence of the earth itself all do as much emotional work as the two leads. The film, reviewed by The Guardian, draws its plausibility from real Icelandic volcanology and the country's documented seismic history, and turns that dossier into a slow-build disaster romance. The premise is simple: a volcanologist and a photographer, formerly a couple, are pulled back into proximity by an eruption that nobody else in Europe seems inclined to take seriously.

Monexus finds that The Fires is best read not just as a piece of apocalyptic speculation but as the most explicit pop-cultural export of Icelandic national-branding since the post-Sigur Rós tourism boom. Disaster cinema has always needed a landscape under siege; here, the landscape in question is a NATO-adjacent North Atlantic state that has spent the past twenty years marketing itself as Europe's safest open-air destination. The film both reinforces that pitch and gently destabilises it, letting the audience watch Reykjavik burn while reminding them, repeatedly, that Iceland is a country with fewer than 400,000 people and more volcanos than it knows what to do with.

A country made of CGI

What sets The Fires apart from the American disaster canon is the seriousness of its geology. The Guardian's reviewer singles out the film's scientific plausibility as its quiet achievement: lava field dynamics, glacial outburst floods, ash-fall projections all appear to have been worked through with actual researchers rather than gestured at in a writers' room. The fissures behave like fissures, the ash plumes travel where Iceland's prevailing winds would actually carry them, and the evacuation order comes from the meteorological office in the kind of dry, calmly numbered language the real office uses.

The downside is visual. The computer-generated lava does most of the heavy lifting, and a viewer who has spent any time on a Reykjanes peninsula webcam will notice that the textures never quite match the muddy, oxidised look of real basalt. The Guardian's verdict lands somewhere between "impressive" and "CGI-tastic," which is about as honest as the genre gets.

The romance does the actual persuading

Plausibility is the frame; the human story is the reason people will sit through ninety minutes of evacuation orders. The volcanologist and the photographer are written as a believable pair of professionals who once failed to translate their shared obsession with Iceland into a working relationship, and the eruption is the pretext for putting them back in the same conference room. Their dialogue carries most of the load: the disaster almost never interrupts a conversation in progress, which means the spectacle functions as punctuation around the relationship rather than the other way round.

There is a quiet political undertow here. The film's Reykjavik is depicted as a small capital that responds to a national emergency almost entirely with its own civil-protection agency, the volunteer search-and-rescue squads that make up ICE-SAR, and a Coast Guard helicopter or two. NATO does not arrive. Brussels does not arrive. The European Union does not convene. The disaster is contained inside an Icelandic institutional envelope, which, whether by accident or design, is a flattering image for a state that for years has negotiated its defence and foreign-policy posture by insisting on its own exceptional smallness.

Volcanism as soft power

This is where the film earns its keep as a national-branding artefact. Iceland's tourism economy has, in the space of a generation, moved from a niche adventure-traveller offering to one of the country's two or three largest export sectors. Visitor numbers have repeatedly outrun infrastructure planning, and policymakers in Reykjavik have spent the best part of a decade looking for narratives that match the country's actual hazard profile without scaring people off.

The Fires is a sophisticated attempt to walk that line. It tells tourists, in effect, that Iceland is a place where the ground occasionally moves, but where the people who study that ground are competent, the rescue services are well organised, and a small nation with the right institutions can handle a continent-sized emergency on its own. The lava is terrifying; the response is reassuring. If the film does well at the box office, the country's tourism board will be quietly thrilled.

What the disaster is for

Disaster films typically act as an excuse to derealise a place: New York gets hit, Tokyo gets hit, San Francisco gets hit. The destruction is consumable partly because the viewer is unlikely ever to be there. The Fires does the opposite, deliberately or not. It makes Reykjavik into a destination the viewer is invited to imagine surviving in, not just witnessing from a safe distance. The cinematographer's lingering shots of the Hallgrímskirkja spire, the Harpa concert hall's facade and the steaming ground at Þingvellir are not incidental. They are a recruitment drive.

The unanswered question is whether the film's premise will actually help or hurt that pitch. Icelandic tourism has been resilient to a series of shocks, the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption being the obvious counter-example, which initially grounded European aviation and then produced a measurable uptick in visitor interest once the ash cleared. If The Fires follows the Eyjafjallajökull pattern, the country's tourist board will end the year quietly delighted. If it does not, it will be remembered as an expensive piece of pyroclastic content that told the world, in high-resolution CGI, exactly why Reykjavik might be a bad bet.

Desk note: Monexus has framed this as a film review and a soft-power case study in equal measure, drawing primarily on The Guardian's coverage of the 21 July 2026 release. Where the sources do not specify a director, distributor or production budget, those details have been left out rather than inferred.