Sirāt

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

SIRĀT   ***

Óliver Laxe

2025

IDEA:  A father, accompanied by his young son, goes searching for his missing daughter amid a Moroccan rave.

BLURB:  Against the desolate, parched expanses of the Western Sahara, Sirāt stages the most austere of contemporary apocalypses. It’s preceded by, what else, a bunch of people lost in their own world(s), completely absorbed by the throbbing bass that has possessed their bodies on a desert dance floor. As Kangding Ray’s techno score booms from towers of subwoofers, Laxe shows us images of blissed-out revelers that could be straight from Burning Man or Coachella, with a majority white young coterie that has claimed a remote open land as their party ground. In Sirāt, it is Europeans in Africa and their attendant legacy of colonialism that shadow the film’s vague geopolitical catastrophe, a “World War III” that abruptly breaks down the rave and sends a ragtag group deep into the Saharan flatlands. On the perilous road trip, Laxe harnesses his considerable audiovisual talents to create a blanched nightmare from endless dust, rocks, and glaring sun, Ray’s techno music now a foreboding presence from beyond instead of a proximal glue for embodied fellow-feeling. Ultimately, the explosiveness of the bass becomes more than figurative, and dancing to forget is no longer an option. The final act of Sirāt is almost excruciatingly tense in its manipulations of movement, timing, and sound and the expectancy they build in the spectator. Laxe’s carefully controlled horror is, in the same breath, kind of crass, turning death into a game of chicken for the mortified First World subject. Once again, we have a European film largely about European sociopolitical myopia that centers European characters in a land that isn’t theirs. Muslim characters appear only on the periphery as nameless refugees in a mythical crisis of passage, which the film appropriates as its title. Sirāt is finally potent and problematic in ways not easily extricable.