Move over Fury Road, an even crazier desert film has hailed the big screen in the form of Sirāt, a maddening and hallucinogenic journey through the deserts of Morocco from the mind of Olivier Laxe. It’s difficult to identify what the end goal is here, for there is certainly an effort to say a lot – a quest to find someone, or something; a reconstructed family; grief and tragedy; political turmoil. To the regular sounds of techno music, its blurry characters move to an uncertain beat, on a journey through space and time that confuses and disorients. Rest assured, there won’t be a single moment in Sirāt that makes any sense at all.
In a prologue, Sirāt is described as a narrow bridge over Hell that people must cross to enter paradise on the Day of Judgement. What follows immediately thereafter is a rave, a loud and thumping opening scene in the dancing is apoplectic and our main cast (all played by non-professional actors) is introduced. Amidst this mania, Luis (Sergi López) and his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) are looking for their daughter/sister Mar, who has been missing for five months, handing out posters to drugged up partygoers. When the rave is shut down abruptly by the military and Europeans are ordered to evacuate, the main cast escape in their trucks in search of another rave deeper in the desert. Convinced that Mar must be there, Luis and Esteban follow suit in their tiny van. What follows is a disastrous journey, one in which tension and tragedy strike, but in which surprising new relationships are forged amid the empty and sultry air.
Scattered and psychedelic, Sirāt is a trip in more ways than one – the onscreen never feels entirely real. Stranger still was my constant nodding off, a rarity in the cinema. I interpret this now as something more than simple ennui – Sirāt on the contrary seems to purposefully lull, lead on, hide the depths of its grotesque underbelly. Its underdeveloped characters and apparent lack of meaning is certainly divisive, and while I adhere to the party frustrated with its hallucinogenic frenzy, one cannot deny that it really does try to create a particular kind of feeling, one difficult to shake off. Its build in tension for this reason should be hailed as a masterclass, with instances that are genuinely jaw-dropping, pushes that feel too far even for the twenty-first century. However, later down the line, these jaw-drops tally up, and Sirāt begins to feel strangely funny, almost switching genres in the final half an hour. Nevertheless, it is also here that it is most anchored in reality, the backdrop of the Rambla de Barrachin a beautiful yet pressing reminder that these ravers do not belong. When lights from the party project onto it in angular shapes, it is also a reminder that the drugs the characters appear to take regularly are almost as underutilised as the location. Very rarely is there the suggestion that any of this may be an illusion, an interesting boundary that could have been played with considering the spiritual dimensions to the Sirāt path. The journey is more important than the destination, Luxe screams throughout, as Luis wakes up entangled with his new family. But this shouldn’t mean that the destination must be given up altogether – after the midway point that turns Sirāt around, storylines are abruptly dropped, and the ending feels rushed, almost like a last-minute budget cut. The only thing that is certain is that Sirāt will shock for years to come (I, for one, have a very particular scene engraved in my memory forever) – and while this value might take the cake over the overall quality of the film, this is something truly novel, and disturbing in the best of ways.
