19-05-2025
‘Sirat' Review: Oliver Laxe's Beguiling Film Is a Desert-Set, Techno-Infused Meditation on Death and Grief
At some point in Oliver Laxe's beguiling new film Sirat, a character asks a fellow traveler their thoughts on what the end of the world might feel like. The friend considers the question before responding, somewhat half-heartedly: 'It's been the end of the world for a long time.'
This sentiment haunts Sirat, which seemingly takes place in a near-apocalyptic future and follows a group of ravers as they journey through the Moroccan desert in search of one last party. Home for this crew is a worn-out caravan, stocked with food, water and other provisions. Community is anyone they meet either at or on their way to dance parties. And on the occasion they turn on the radio, the news warns of escalating wars, depleting resources and a breakdown in diplomatic relations. The harshness of this world, conjured by Laxe with his signature painterly vision, feels a lot like our own.
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Premiering at Cannes in competition, Sirat marks Laxe's fourth time on the Croisette. His debut You Are All Captain earned him an award in Directors' Fortnight in 2010; he won a prize for his 2016 Critics' Week film Mimosas and another for the gorgeous Fire Will Come, which premiered in 2019 in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. Sirat is the director's first film in competition, a charged meditation on grief and possibility in a world edging toward collapse. It is a beautiful film (Pedro Almodóvar is a producer) filled with those unhurried landscape shots the director loves so much. But the movie's message can be punishing and oddly muddied at times.
Working from a screenplay co-written with his usual collaborator Santiago Fillol, Laxe crafts a story about itinerant characters negotiating the realities of different losses — on both societal and interpersonal levels. The desert is the perfect setting for this reflection, as the arid location functions as both a repository for overwhelming feelings and a reminder of our own smallness in the grand scheme of things.
The last few years of global history, marked by the twin forces of a viral pandemic and an accelerating climate crisis, have underscored a discomfort with death. In the United States, at least, collective mourning is not a part of the culture, and the idea of death is met with avoidance rather than affirmation. Laxe, a French-born filmmaker of Galician ancestry, has been steadily confronting that in each of his projects. Mimosas was framed around the delivery of a body to an ancestral resting place, and while Fire Will Come principally observed an arsonist recently released from prison, it also meditated on the idea of cultural extinction.
Sirat begins and ends with different kinds of losses. The film opens with Luis (an excellent Sergi Lopez) and his son Esteban (Brúno Nuñez) searching the grounds of an outdoor rave for his daughter Mar. Laxe indulges in languorous shots of people dancing to techno, blasted from a set of large outdoor speakers, in a small pocket of the desert. Their bodies sway to the rhythmic thumps of the hypnotic music, composed by the French artist Kangding Ray. His score is complemented by Laia Casanova's stellar sound design, which turns the ambient noises of the desert into their own soundtrack. Laxe displays a considered understanding of the cathartic self-expression inherent to techno and raves specifically. The kind of experience now associated with out-of-touch thrill seekers at Burning Man adopts deeper meaning here.
Luis and Esteban snake their way through this crowd, handing out flyers of Mar in hopes that someone has seen her. The pair eventually come upon a group who wonder if Mar might be at the next dance party. Driven by desperation, Luis and Esteban follow the two vans carrying Stef (Stefania Gadda), Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson), Tonin (Tonin Janvier), Jade (Jade Oukid) and Bigui (Richard Bellamy) from this gathering to another one.
At first, the veteran ravers try to get rid of Luis and Esteban, but the father and son duo are persistent. This journey of reluctant alliances at times reminded me of the one in Octavia Butler's novel Parable of the Sower, another work that deals with the forced itinerancy brought on by the end of the world.
Sirat is at its most familiar as a Laxe-ian work in the middle, when this crew traverses the scorched landscape. Laxe revels in the beauty and imposing scale of the Sahara desert (where Sirat was filmed) with scenes of the cars rolling up steep mountains or getting lost in impromptu sand storms. The geographical isolation imbues the film with a haunting, almost otherworldly atmosphere.
Ironically, Sirat gets muddled near the end. Although the last act is in many ways the liveliest — viewers will be jolted by a series of bleak twists — it's also where Laxe relinquishes narrative coherence in the service of making his metaphors more literal. The filmmaker leans into a sort of spectacle typically associated with genre works to wrestle with his theories about death as well as to actualize the film's title (which roughly translates to 'path' in Arabic), but his ideas — in part because of the sheer quantity — seem more embryonic here. There's also a dubiously judged scene in which more obviously racialized characters are used in a way that comes off as more aesthetic than meaningful.
Despite these flaws, Sirat is an energizing film — a project determined to wake us up.
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