The Spanish director Óliver Laxe (“Fire Will Come”) takes his audience with “Sirāt“In the border region between reality and transcendence. What begins as a road movie in search of a disappeared daughter develops into a terrifying consequence into a dark vision of a world in emergency. While a global war is raging in the background-especially via radio tap, a Raver community that tries to decouple itself from reality.
“Sirāt” oscillates between the feverish euphoria of ecstatic dance scenes, the vastness of the Moroccan desert and the desolation of a world that has already been out of joint. In his third feature film, Laxe creates a compact, metaphorically charged moral image in intoxicating desert shots in his third feature film. “Sirāt” is not an escapism, but an existential drama about loss, community and the (disposable) running in the desert, both in the literal and figurative sense.
Luis (Sergi López) and his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez) work on the desert raves like silted-out foreign bodies.
A rave in the middle of the Moroccan desert. While ecstatic bodies dance in dust to pulsating basses, two outsiders mix under the crowd: Luis (Sergi López) and his twelve -year -old son Esteban (Bruno Núñez) are looking for Luis' daughter Mar, who has been disappearing for months. Her trace leads her here, but nobody seems to know the lost or seen. A few Raver tell of a next event on the border with Mauritania, to which Mar could possibly come.
The next day, the illegal event will be cleared by the military, apparently the Third World War broke out. The vehicles are escorted on the only street. But then a group simply breaks out with their converted trucks and breaks down across the desert towards the Atlas Mountains. Luis hesitates, but then – always in the hope of finding his daughter – follows the trucks that are depending on. A journey through archaic, hostile landscapes begins …
Apocalyptic hints of “Mad Max”
Almost documentary, Óliver Laxe begins his film awarded in 2025 with the award of the jury in Cannes: “Sirāt” shows with a sober eye how a huge sound system is built in the middle of the Moroccan stone desert. The first bass soon boom out of speaker towers, and body get into ecstasy. A rave in nowhere begins, apparently detached from time and the world. But the intoxicating euphoria is not permanent and opens the journey through misanthropic terrain and further into a no man's land-that even has certain “Mad Max” vibes.
The action is deliberately fragmentary. Who these people are, how they found each other, what drives them – all of this is only indicated. Dialogues are sparse, explanations are missing. Instead, Laxe relies on audiovisual experience. What matters is experience – physically, sound, visual. The audience becomes observers of a taciturn but intensive state of emergency, which is increasingly charging towards metaphor. But certainly you must never feel on this trip, because the desert is too dangerous for that and the fate that laxly provides for its characters is too painful.
The dangerous journey through the desert and the mountains is almost reminiscent of the William Friedkin cult classic “Breathless with fear”.
The landscape itself plays a leading role. The desert becomes a metaphorical sirāt, a narrow bridge over hell in Islamic belief in hereafter, a place of testing, the purification, but also the fatal temptation. In granular pictures, Laxe's regular cameraman Mauro Herce captures the archaic width, shot almost exclusively in the open air, in the glistful light of the Atlas Mountains. From a distance, his camera observes how the trucks struggle through rubble and dust, like foreign bodies in a world that is not good for them. In their setting and force, these images remind of the “Mad Max” films in places, but without action spectacles, but with a ventilated, contemplative intensity.
Ins Not separately associated with the visual language of the film is the hypnotic soundscape of Kangding Ray, whose score consists of booming basslines and waving, dark synthesizer areas that develop a threatening suction effect. The continuous beat, sometimes driving, sometimes oppressive, is the emotional backbone of the film. It gives the scenes energy, pulls the characters – and with them the audience – ever deeper into a state between intoxication and resignation. Music becomes an emotional clock, the pulse of a present that seems to dissolve.
Nobody stops the apocalypse
But the collective intoxication, the moments of the community, ecstatic forgetting, they break suddenly and without warning. “Sirāt” also tells of the hybris to want to decouple themselves from world events – always in faith, in the rhythm of the beats the demise could be danced away. From Rave to Rave, the community stumbles into a vision of the end time and ultimately pays a high price. The desert forgives nothing. And also not the Óliver Laxe cinema. Pain and loss as well as the shattering knowledge remain: no beat in the world can stop the end!
Conclusion: With “Sirãt” óliver Laxe has created a beat-driven road movie about loss and escapism, which shocked with its unscrupulous, painful twists and transports a feeling for the desolation of the world. A film like a mental test – existential, adamant, hypnotic.