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| Images courtesy of NEON Releasing |
French-born Galician writer-director-actor Óliver Laxe, the man
behind You All Are Captains, Mimosas and Fire Will Come,
has been tinkering with the idea of his two-time Academy Award nominee Sirāt
from last year as far back as the early 2010s. Initially pitched as kind of Mad Max sojourn
through the barren desert with several truckers before the idea languished and
was later revived during the making of his second 2016 feature Mimosas,
the Moroccan and Spanish set, then-untitled film incorporated neorealist street
casting with rave culture into a kind of dizzying sensorial overload.
Filled with striking Super 16mm wide-angled
vistas by Mauro Herce and a pulsating rave infused score by electronic musician
Kangding Ray (David Letellier) rendered in Dolby Atmos in an Academy Award nominated
sound mix which makes the picture a fully loaded sight and sonic assault, the film
finally entitled Sirāt represents director Laxe’s first real notable
international crossover as well as his most politically charged work. Moreover, as a new distribution grab by NEON,
Sirāt is posited somewhere between the neorealist dance horrors of Climax
and the distinctly Spanish set World War III-like pending apocalypse
glimpsed in New Order.
An initially nebulous experience chronicling rave culture in
the deserts of Morocco, Sirāt follows a middle-aged father named Luis (Sergi López from Pan’s Labyrinth) traveling with his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) in tow
in search of his missing daughter Mar who disappeared into the desert dance rave
scene. Shortly after bumping into a
group of ravers, many of whom are missing limbs and Luis asks if he can tag
along with in the hopes Mar might turn up wherever they go, military trucks
with armed soldiers arrive to break up the rave indicating an armed conflict
has broken out.
The ravers consisting of
Stef (Stefania Gadda), Jade (Jade Oukid), Tonin (Tonin Janvier), Bigui (Richard
Bellamy) and Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson) try unsuccessfully to talk an
undeterred Luis out of pressing further ahead into war torn territory. Increasingly, as they venture through
Mauritania and later mountainous terrain, the film takes on The Wages of Fear/Sorcerer
characteristics of precarious danger while the dark and punishing pull of
early-2000s Alejandro González Iñárritu is just lurking around the corner.
A film that begins not wholly unlike where Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Zabriskie Point ends up, in the craggy mountainside throes of a rave
party replete with squeaky oversized speakers in constant need of repair before
taking on the grungy feel of an outback-like road movie, Sirāt is an
engrossing and affecting ensemble drama that hits harder than most movies dare
to in unexpected places. With
reverberating, scratchy and thundering electronica which sounds at times like
turning a blown-out speaker full blast interspersed with realistic
environmental soundscapes including but not limited to high winds and the
scalding hot burn of motor vehicles soldiering on ahead through the desert,
watching and yes hearing the film too is a bit like stepping into an open
sauna.
But its not all sound and fury as
it quiets down to a pin drop amid scenes of the ensemble characters carrying
each other through this odyssey into the unknown. Besides seasoned actors Sergi López and Bruno Núñez Arjona as the father-son team who almost dare
one another to continue ahead with this treacherous journey who convey a wealth
of controlled emotional weathers, most of the rest of the cast consists of real
ravers more or less playing themselves with some having lost a hand or a leg. For a largely street-cast non-actor
collection of characters, everyone involved finds ample room to convey genuine
heartfelt fatigue, terror and heartbreak, also lending itself to the Climax comparisons
and its use of dancers rather than trained actors in the cast.
Premiering at the 78th Cannes Film Festival in
2025 where it won the Jury Prize, Best Soundtrack and was further nominated for
Best International Feature and Best Sound at the Academy Awards, the €6.5
million budgeted Sirāt acquired by NEON in the US took in around $13 million
during its limited theatrical run including sold out 35mm screenings at the
Music Box Theater. A critical darling
despite the limited theatrical run in the US which will hopefully gain further
cult traction now with home theater streaming devices, Sirāt is a
hallucinogenic horror that was never going to be for everyone.
Robust and heavy as an anvil left out in the
scorching sun all day and sizzling to the touch, its mixture of road movie, action
thriller, political commentary and character study as sensory experience from afar
set itself apart from the pack. A
powerful, Antonioni-esque existential horror laced with traces of Kubrick,
Lynch and the aforementioned Iñárritu in terms of evoking an unforgiving if not
punishing environment as well as cornering viewers into a shocked and defeated
headspace, Sirāt is the kind of film that washes over you with dusty, dirty
aspects that stick with you days after watching it.
--Andrew Kotwicki