Courtesy of NEON.
New York Film Festival 2025:
Sirāt
Rating **** Masterpiece
Directed by Óliver Laxe
Forgive me for opening what’s putatively a New York Film Festival review (written and published more than a month after Closing Night) with a personal experience from earlier this week in Los Angeles. I attended one of the more improbable events related to an arthouse film I’ve ever heard of: a rave for Sirāt, presided over by director Óliver Laxe and primarily driven by composer and DJ Kangding Ray, held at the Regent Theater. Though the event stretched from before 10 PM to (though I didn’t stay until the end) 2 AM, the centerpiece was a roughly 45-minute block in the middle, where the more familiar if anonymous electronic beats melted away in favor of a non-chronological presentation of the film’s score, which only sometimes goes full techno. On the screen, scenes and outtakes from the film played out, projected by Laxe from a laptop on the other side of the table of Ray. As the sizable crowd watched, swaying and gradually getting more energetic, the towering director remained hunched over, almost immobile, absorbed in what felt increasingly like a task that required the utmost precision.
While the rave was not at all a replacement for the film it sought to promote, that dichotomy sums up as well as anything the staggering achievement that is Sirāt, as vivid a bolt from the blue as any from this decade in film thus far. Little seemed to presage its arrival, which is not to say that Laxe was an entirely unknown quantity. The Galician director made his feature debut with You All Are Captains in 2010 at Cannes—the festival where all his films have premiered, including Mimosas (2016) and Fire Will Come (2019), both past NYFF selections. These works, while certainly deserving of their selections and plaudits—every one of these four films, including Sirāt with its main competition Jury prize, received an award at the festival—only hinted at what was to come. There was the forbidding beauty of the Moroccan desert, the quest-like narratives, and the magisterial opening and closing of Fire Will Come, but they were the service of perhaps deceptively small-scale narratives, where the wider implications seemed incidental to their characters.
Not so with Sirāt, which opens, not unlike Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock, with the assembly of a mountain of speakers in the desert. As the music begins to reverberate, Laxe deploys a few shots of surrounding cliffs, before cutting to the already assembled mass of dancers. The great Spanish DP Mauro Herce’s 16mm camera focuses on a few revelers at a time, each given an equal amount of attention, with only an opening credit card to signal the constituents of the crew that will eventually become the film’s center. Into this scene ambles Luis (Sergi López) a Spanish father searching for his daughter—a raver who has been missing for a number of months—with his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) in tow.
Depending on the reader, this barest outline might be the best place to stop any further description of the narrative of Sirāt. To a degree almost unheard of in recent memory for a film that exists firmly in the arthouse space, critics have placed an emphasis on avoiding spoilers, considering the turns that the film takes. For my own part, I’ll simply note the following moments, but you can skip to the next paragraph if you’d prefer that: the rave is broken up by a contingent of soldiers, who say that an international armed conflict has broken out and that all Europeans must join their convoy. A group of five ravers across two heavy-duty trucks, who had previously mentioned that there would be another rave deeper in the Moroccan desert, manage to escape, followed by Luis and Esteban in their camper van.
But while the twists were essential to my first viewing and I wouldn’t want to take that away from anyone who wanted to experience that for themselves, it should be stressed that Sirāt is by no means a one-and-done, shock value film with nothing else of value; to confirm this I watched the film a second time and was not one iota less moved. Laxe’s choice of title—laid out in an opening intertitle giving the definition of a bridge connecting heaven and hell, narrower than a strand of hair and sharper than a sword—is perhaps none too subtle about the spiritual aims at its core, but his film is in essence an examination of connections between the sacred and the earthly, each tied in accordance to a certain set of rules that must be divined through experience. In this respect, rave culture (which I myself do not partake in) is a perfect medium within which the action unfolds, one actively undertaken by the characters at key moments but more often embodied in a certain attitude and way of living. Even more than most forms of dance, it is both communal—rarely taking place outside of a crush of people—and profoundly internal, deemphasizing all normal conceptions of music and lyrics in favor of pure impulse, a mode which no one person will respond to in quite the same way. Hence, while it is Luis’s quest that drives the film, Laxe does not seek to elevate his point of view above his companions, whose love of the rave is taken for granted as an integral part of themselves as much as Luis and Esteban’s familial ties.
Sirāt‘s recurring image, over and over, is of the three vehicles proceeding across a desolate landscape, the van always lagging behind but never completely out of view. It has already drawn comparisons to other perilous driving films—The Wages of Fear and Sorcerer of course, but Mad Max: Fury Road is just as evident—and for my own part I thought about Meek’s Cutoff, especially during an early scene where they must ford a river. But Laxe has cited a much more curious automotive journey as a primary referent: Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, whose own car probably never travels over 55 miles per hour and never has to navigate terrain more treacherous than a slightly bumpy hill. And yet, this comparison cuts closely to the heart of what makes Sirāt so captivating: just like Mr. Badii, whose resolve to take the ultimate action is questioned and shaped by the happenstance companions he takes on along the way, so too are each of Laxe’s characters regarding their own motivations. As the film shrinks its focus further and further toward these seven people, two dogs, and three vehicles, its implications seem to escalate more and more, as their desperation becomes synonymous with all of existence. That World War III, the apocalypse, and the end of the world may all be happening in the background does not cheapen their trials for Laxe; instead, it affirms it. Sirāt is, if not a celebration, then as vivid a portrait as any in recent times of the ways in which people push past their limits in the most extreme of situations.
Taipei Mansions 