There’s nothing quite like Sirāt, and I don’t mean that in the blurby sense that usually signals faint praise or studio desperation. Óliver Laxe has made something truly strange, arresting, and stubbornly unclassifiable, a film that Spain, with uncharacteristic confidence, is sending to the Oscars this year. After its round of ovations and awards at Cannes and other festivals, it’s easy to see why. But if you’re expecting a crowd-pleasing international darling with some lush Almodóvar melodrama or a sweeping Civil War epic, well, buckle in. Sirāt is neither cozy nor polite. It is instead a dusty hallucination and a fevered desert trek that begins as a road movie and mutates, almost imperceptibly, into something savage, ecstatic, and unnervingly beautiful.
The setup could be mistaken for something sentimental. A father, Luis (Sergi López), and his teenage son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), searching the Moroccan desert for their missing daughter and sister. On paper, it sounds like a family drama with a conveniently exotic backdrop. In practice, it’s more like The Odyssey with MDMA. The missing girl has drifted into the orbit of a band of desert ravers who live nomadically, hauling generators and speaker stacks from one dune to another, setting up ad hoc utopias where the bass never stops and the body briefly forgets the burdens of the world. They have names like Stef, Jade, Tonin, Bigui, and Josh, characters who seem at once utterly ridiculous and strangely magnetic, like angels in neon goggles. They are carefree, joyous, drugged to the gills, and utterly alien to the father and son who stumble upon them.
But this is not some kooky “odd couple” fable. Sirāt is a trickster of a film, luring you in with the shimmer of its premise only to gut you with what’s underneath. It exists in a faintly sketched future, after a vague World War III has left the globe fractured and frayed. We don’t see the war, Laxe is too sly for that, but its residue is everywhere with empty roads, broken infrastructures, a sense of permanent displacement. The ravers, it turns out, aren’t just escapists. They are survivors who’ve chosen joy as their rebellion. Their musical bacchanals aren’t just parties, they’re rituals to stave off despair.
And then, of course, the shocks arrive. Not cheap jump scares, but those quiet, ruthless narrative ambushes that lodge themselves in your spine. Remember Ari Aster’s Hereditary, when an ordinary family drama swerved into unspeakable horror in one split-second decapitation? Laxe delivers that kind of whiplash more than once, each time stripping away another illusion of safety. It’s brutal, not for gore but for emotional impact, and it forces the characters, Luis, Esteban, the ravers, even us, to confront what really matters when there’s nothing left but sand and sound.
This is also where Laxe shows his most subversive hand. Because beneath the terror, the sudden deaths, the unflinching cruelty, there is an odd tenderness at play. Sirāt is about a father’s stubborn love, about the unexpected communities that form among strangers, and about the way beauty intrudes on even the most desolate of landscapes. In one moment, a rave beat thunders across the desert at dawn, and the camera lingers on faces. It’s not euphoric, but fragile, searching. It’s a reminder that joy, like grief, is a survival mechanism.
The performances are pitch-perfect. Sergi López carries the weariness of a man who has already lost too much, while young Bruno Núñez Arjona offers a performance of raw, unstudied vulnerability, equal parts exasperated teenager and unlikely prophet. And the ravers, played by Stef, Jade, Tonin, Bigui, and Josh, could easily have been caricatures of hipster decadence, but instead they become something softer, stranger, and more human. They help, they laugh, and they mourn. They’re the last people on earth you’d want your daughter to run away with, until suddenly they’re the only people you’d trust in the desert.
Watching Sirāt feels like being pulled into two films at once. On one level, it’s a merciless survival thriller, echoing the kinetic intensity of Mad Max: Fury Road, all dust and desperation and sudden violence. On another, it’s a meditation on the accidental beauty of life’s ugliest corners, like a Werner Herzog adventure that accidentally wandered into a warehouse rave. Laxe stitches brutality and beauty together until you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
By the final stretch, you’re not just watching a film, you’re staggering alongside it, windburned, exhausted, heart in your throat, and strangely grateful. It’s not about the destination, as the old adage goes. It’s about the journey. And in Sirāt, that journey is one of the most punishing and exhilarating you’ll find in modern cinema. Laxe has made a film that burns, aches, and glows all at once. It’s not for the faint of heart. But then, the most unforgettable journeys never are.
