IFFI 2025 | ‘Sirat’ movie review: Rave, road, ruin, repeat in Oliver Laxe’s bone-rattling odyssey

Oliver Laxe’s Sirat is overwhelming by design. I went in wanting a desert movie with cool music and walked out with the Sahara forming in the cave in my chest. If you’ve ever wondered what a subwoofer manifesting purgatory sounds like, Sirat is the answer.

The French-Spanish filmmaker opens his Cannes Jury Prize-winner with a swarm of bodies moving to electronic pulses in the southern stretches of Morocco. The rave is a temporary republic of heat, dust and dance, where enormous speakers rise like edifices, and the gathering seems immune to interruption. You feel the rhythms of this early sequence in your ribcage before you register in your head, and Laxe shapes this space with observational calm, letting the rave breathe long enough for us to understand what’s about to be lost.

Into this gathering walk Luis (Sergi López), his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), and their dog, Pipa. Their presence is plain, as if they’ve taken a wrong turn, but they’re here because Luis’s daughter vanished months ago after chasing a circuit of itinerant parties. The rave becomes an improvised search site, and the only way forward emerges through a casual exchange when a group of ravers mention another gathering farther south, close to the Mauritanian border. These ravers are different flesh — Jade, Tonin, Bigui, Stef, and Josh — people whose bodies narrate more than their mouths, replete with tattoos, piercings, a prosthetic leg and a missing forearm. Laxe casts many of them from the Free Party movement he’s known for a decade, and builds on these non-actors who know how to move in a crowd. Their fidgety energy unsettles Luis, but it’s enough for them to follow.

A still from ‘Sirat’
| Photo Credit:
Neon

From there Sirat becomes a travelogue with its spine exposed, and the film finds new rhythm on the road. It traffics in patient, arthouse frames of long drives and wide, contemplative horizons, while also courting genre mechanics. Daylight softens the landscape into expanses of ochre and stone. The vehicles crawl across ground that never stays predictable. Mountains that look worn down by centuries flatten you with their scale, and Mauro Herce shoots on gorgeous 16-mm grain that films stretches of Morocco with walloping intimidation.

Laxe builds this early stretch with a surprising lightness. The group shares food, resources, and occasional disbelief at the absurdity of their circumstances. Luis chips in for petrol, Tonin performs a puppet routine with his knee, Esteban gets a half-rattail buzzcut, and Pipa falls ill after ingesting something it shouldn’t have. These moments are handled without sentiment, and the simplicity of these off-grid exchanges creates a curious solidarity. But just when you’ve settled into these dusty, sun-stoned tempos, Laxe snaps the spell like he’s personally offended that you were enjoying yourself.

A still from ‘Sirat’
| Photo Credit:
Neon

[SPOILER WARNING]

The tonal rug-pull begins with Luis’s van sliding off a mountain pass, and suddenly Esteban and Pipa are swallowed by the cliff with a bluntness that feels almost punitive. Laxe forces us to sit in it, like a parent turning off the music mid-party because someone broke something. From here, the film mutates into a gauntlet.

Luis stumbles into grief, wandering through sand and wind until the ravers find him again. Still carrying the psychological shrapnel of earlier violence, the group sets up a hesitant attempt at consolation at dusk. Two speakers, an open sky, and some psychedelic-therapy are enough for a makeshift rave. The music lifts the group for a moment, as they slip into a delirious, communal healing dance. This is when Laxe knows he has us right where he wants us. He drags the moment out of its dreamy fugue and straight into yet another catastrophe.

Jade steps forward and vanishes into an explosion. Tonin steps on another when he tries to reach her. They wandered into a minefield concealed beneath sand. One second you’re luxuriating in this post-traumatic release; the next, you feel Laxe reaching clean through the screen with a grin that says he planned to ruin the rest of your evening from the start.

Stripped of the certainty that drove him, Luis steps onward anyway, testing his faith in a straight line that leads to a rocky outcrop. Bigui follows and doesn’t survive. Stef and Josh walk with their eyes closed, and somehow they make it through. The film leaves them on the roof of a slow-moving train, crossing the desert with unnamed strangers, and that final cathartic image carries mythic status.

Kangding Ray’s tectonic score repeatedly rearranges your spinal alignment. It’s one of the year’s most meticulously sculpted soundscapes, with a charged, nerve-deep architecture that is the film’s actual bloodstream. In the rave sequences, his bass colonises the air until the bodies on screen feel like tuning forks. In quieter stretches, he pulls everything back to a bare electrical hum that feels like the desert breathing. The mutating techno-ambience is ecstatic, disorienting and brutally honest about the scale of the journey; and the multitudes to these textured vibrations are seamlessly threaded through by Laia Cassanova’s incredible sound design.

Laxe’s filmmaking is grounded even when the world around his characters bends toward allegory. The title refers to a narrow bridge that divides damnation from paradise, and the metaphor is ever-present but never heavy. The script, co-written with Santiago Fillol, refuses explanations, working instead through land, body, sound and heat. If the movie’s last act feels too muddled in ambiguity, I still circle back to the image Laxe gives us more than once, of a tangle of bodies asleep in the back of a truck, held together by simple human fatigue. That tableau is humane in a way the film’s grander sensibilities often forgets.

Laxe also knows the politics and pretences that orbit rave culture. He both honours and punctures this post-capitalist thought experiment about collectivity and the fantasy of living just outside the system’s line of sight, where bodies can exist without surveillance or hierarchy. The anti-system ethos of improvised repair work, mutual aid, and humour-as-glue, helps the troupe survive in flashes, but it also proves fragile when the world’s actual structures press in.

Sirat will make you impatient and it will make you ache. It will also remind you that a film can be a livid, feral, out-of-body experience in a dignified festival auditorium. I left feeling scoured and alert. Watch this on the biggest of screens or with the best sound system you can afford, but bring a spare set of nerves. Laxe will use them.

Sirat was screened at the ongoing 56th International Film Festival of India in Goa

Published – November 25, 2025 11:11 pm IST