Sirāt review – a truly staggering, major film

Euphoria and devastation are the twin emotional poles that prop up the lopsided big top that is Oliver Laxe’ Sirât, a film about life, death, and music that’s not made for your ears but for your heart. The film opens with the building of a miniature ancient civilisation, the bricks and mortar being used are giant speakers that are being piled into skyscraper-like monoliths in the Moroccan desert. A community of tattooed revellers who look like they have been sprung from a Mad Max movie have come to worship at the altar of rave, and the film sets its audiovisual template by having them commune with bass-heavy electronic music played at ear-splitting volumes.

Enter ambling, worried father Luis (Sergi López) and his pre-teen son Esteban (Bruno Núñez), handing out flyers for their missing daughter/​sister, who left six months ago and was said to be at a desert rave like this one. They try not to harsh the other ravers’ mellow, but are ultimately futile in their search. But they do meet Stephy (Stefania Gadda), Josh (Joshua Liam Herderson), Tonin (Tonin Janvier), Jade (Jade Oukid) and Bigui (Richard Bellamy), who mention they’re going to be driving down to another rave in Mauritania, and so they follow the gang on their long road trip in a dinky people carrier. 

Laxe is a filmmaker whose early work, such as We Are Not Captains and Mimosas, inhabited a more playful metacinematic territory, while his most recent Fire Will Come from 2019 saw him erring a little more towards conventional narrative and directly articulated themes. Sirât is his most expansive, unique and troubling (in a good way!) film, initially proposing something that would seem cosily approachable – a study of a makeshift family formed around the search for a missing woman – but pivots very suddenly into the realms of symbolic fable, where the base elements that have been served to us are suddenly made to look and sound completely different.

Bubbling in the background of the film is the suggestion of an apocalyptic societal meltdown, as the first rave we join is eventually raided by the military and everyone is told to disband and return to their homes. Our ad-hoc convoy never receive any direct threats from this ominous military presence while on their journey, but the rugged, forbidding landscape they travel across has been beaten in and manipulated by years of struggle and conflict. They drive over ghosts, history, the memories of failed attempts to built the type of community which they take for granted.

The gang are very easygoing and chill, and Luis and Esteban can’t help but form a deeper bond than one where they’re mere navigators. The pair are even a little amused when their gorgeous little dog Più Più is found convulsing having consumed a dose of LSD through one of the raver’s nighttime shits. Laxe turns certain character stereotypes inside out with these juiced-up ravers being considerate, philosophical, empathetic, humorous and completely in tune with other’s needs. It’s a vision of a roughshod utopia, self-built and nestled on the outer fringes of a civilisation that is crumbling in on itself.

Yet just like pulsing, repetitive EDM music, the tone, the key, the melody and the BPMs suddenly pivot to invite a different type of dance and a new set of movements. Paradise found is now paradise lost, as the treacherous route suddenly gets the upper hand and this fragile unit begins to disintegrate. If you’re reading anything about this film and it starts to go into too much detail about its extraordinary second half, then you should stop reading instantly, as part of the magic of this thrill is the expert way in which evolves into something that is both overwhelmingly (even comically) dark, but also offers the same rhapsodic bodily disconnect that the characters themselves are searching for.

Sirât is a truly staggering and major film, one that has to be seen to be believed – a masterful gambit of affectionate character and community building that mutates into a work that deals with the primal instincts of human survival and the idea that we create our own gods through the things that we chose to worship.