A father (Sergi López) and his son arrive at a rave deep in the mountains of southern Morocco. They are searching for Mar — daughter and sister — who vanished months ago at one of these endless, sleepless parties. Surrounded by electronic music and a raw, unfamiliar sense of freedom, they hand out her photo again and again. Hope is fading, but they push through and follow a group of ravers heading to one last party in the desert. As they venture deeper into the burning wilderness, the journey forces them to confront their own limits.
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There’s a moment about halfway through Óliver Laxe’s “Sirāt” when a one-legged French street performer named Tonin improvises a puppet show using his own stump, entertaining the ragged group of ravers he’s traveling with across the Moroccan desert. It’s a scene of such unexpected tenderness and strangeness that you don’t quite know how to react—you want to laugh, you want to cry, you feel vaguely uncomfortable, and yet you can’t look away. This is the peculiar spell that Laxe casts throughout his film: he keeps you perpetually off-balance, never letting you settle into the comfortable rhythms of genre or expectation.
The premise sounds like it could have been pitched in a studio boardroom: a Spanish father named Luis travels with his son Esteban to a rave in the Moroccan desert, searching for his missing daughter Mar. They fall in with a group of young European ravers heading to an even more remote party near the Mauritanian border, while radio broadcasts announce the outbreak of what sounds like World War III. You might expect a thriller, or perhaps one of those apocalyptic road movies that Hollywood churns out with depressing regularity. Laxe gives you neither. What he gives you instead is something far more disorienting and, ultimately, far more devastating.
The title itself is a declaration of intent. In Islamic eschatology, the sirāt is the bridge that souls must cross to reach paradise—a bridge described as thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword. Those who falter fall into the abyss below. Laxe’s film is that bridge made cinematic: a journey where every step forward carries the possibility of annihilation, where survival is never guaranteed and rarely earned.
What makes “Sirāt” so remarkable is how Laxe builds his world through texture rather than exposition. The first act unfolds with an almost languorous patience, establishing the dynamics between the travelers. Luis, played by the veteran Spanish actor Sergi López, carries a quiet desperation beneath his gruff exterior—this is a man who has already lost one child and cannot bear to lose another. His son Esteban, played by Bruno Núñez Arjona, is more skeptical, less driven, perhaps already mourning a sister he suspects is gone for good. Their dog Pipa becomes an unlikely emotional anchor, a creature of pure innocence in a landscape that will show no mercy.
The ravers themselves are a motley collection: Stef, an Italian woman who lives off the grid on a ranch in Spain; Jade, a French photographer and amateur filmmaker; Tonin with his missing leg and his inexhaustible spirit; the British Bigui and the American Josh. None of them, except López and Núñez, are professional actors. Laxe and his costume designer Nadia Acimi found them through a street-casting process at festivals and in small towns across Europe. Tonin really did lose his leg in a motorcycle accident. Stefania Gadda really does live outside conventional society. This authenticity seeps into every frame—when these people share food around a campfire or nurse the sick dog back to health, you’re not watching performance, you’re watching existence.
Laxe shoots on Super 16mm film, and his cinematographer Mauro Herce transforms the desert into something simultaneously gorgeous and menacing. The landscapes of southern Morocco—and the Spanish locations in Teruel and Zaragoza that double for them—have a sculptural quality, as if carved by indifferent gods who take no interest in human affairs. The production reportedly endured sandstorms that destroyed equipment and forced extensive reshoots, and you can feel that hostility in the images themselves. This is not the romanticized desert of Lawrence of Arabia; it’s a place that wants you dead.
Then comes the second act, and the film changes utterly. I won’t spoil what happens—to do so would be a kind of crime against the viewing experience—but I can tell you that Laxe orchestrates at least two sequences of such shocking violence that audiences at Cannes reportedly gasped audibly. These are not the cheap thrills of horror movies, not the manufactured jolts of a genre exercise. They emerge organically from the narrative and hit with the force of genuine tragedy. Laxe himself has said that one scene in particular haunted him through writing, filming, and editing—that he could never not be troubled by it. You’ll know which one he means.
The sound design by Laia Casanova deserves special mention, as does the electronic score by David Letellier, who records under the name Kangding Ray. Together they create an aural landscape that’s as immersive and unsettling as the visual one. The rave sequences pulse with a hypnotic intensity—you understand why these young people have given themselves over to this music, this culture, this way of moving through the world. And when the bass drops away and silence floods in, that silence becomes almost unbearable.
Critics have reached for comparisons: Mad Max, Zabriskie Point, The Wages of Fear, Sorcerer, Gerry, Nomadland. I understand the impulse—we need reference points to describe the unfamiliar—but “Sirāt” ultimately resists categorization. It belongs to a rare species of film that feels sui generis, born from a wholly personal vision that nonetheless connects to something universal. Laxe has described it as his most political and most radical work, and while I’m not entirely sure what he means by that, I think it has something to do with the way the film strips away all the usual comforts and forces you to confront fundamental questions. What does it mean to survive when those around you perish? What is the value of a destination if the journey destroys everything you love? Is there meaning in suffering, or is there only suffering?
The ending will divide audiences. Some will find it too ambiguous, too unresolved. Others—and I count myself among them—will recognize it as the only honest conclusion to what has come before. The survivors we’re left with have crossed their sirāt, but whether they’ve reached paradise or simply another desert is left deliberately unclear. They ride on the roof of a train alongside other displaced souls, heading somewhere, anywhere, away from what they’ve lost.
“Sirāt” won the Jury Prize at Cannes, earned Golden Globe nominations for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Score, and has been selected as Spain’s submission for the Academy Awards. These accolades are deserved, but they also feel somehow inadequate to the experience of actually watching the film. This is not a movie you admire from a distance; it’s one that gets under your skin and stays there, troubling your sleep, making you flinch at unexpected sounds.
See it in a theater if you possibly can. The sound design alone demands it—this is a film that needs to be felt in your chest, not just heard through earbuds. And see it without knowing too much, if that’s still possible. Let Laxe take you across his bridge. You may not arrive where you expected, but you will arrive somewhere you won’t forget.
