A Cruel Dance

Sirât by Oliver Laxe

Sirât, the new film by Oliver Laxe and winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes, opens with a placard about As-Sirāt, the Sirat Bridge. According to Islamic eschatology, this bridge connects heaven and hell and is said to be thinner than a hair and sharper than a razor. On Judgment Day, every human being must cross it. Sirât promises to be a film full of dividing lines and invisible boundaries: inhospitable roads, confusing tracks, and a hostile landscape that’s difficult to traverse. All kinds of human barriers also play a role, such as the lack of understanding between the closed rave community and outsiders in the film, the relationship between father and child, or the distance between the characters and the local population, which is undergoing a national crisis somewhere in the background. Finally, the reference to Judgment Day raises the question of whether the actions and intentions in the film will ultimately be evaluated.

The film begins when the sixty-year-old Luis arrives at a rave in the Moroccan desert with his son Esteban, searching for Mar, his daughter, who disappeared a few months earlier during a similar party. The first images show the music equipment being set up in the sand. First, we hear music, then follow images of the desert landscape, the texture of the earth, crisscrossed with erosion lines. Only then do the ravers appear, dancing in the setting sun. Sweaty, ecstatic faces and bodies pass by, and in their rapture, the ravers form a pulsating but closed community, portrayed by non-professional actors. Luis and Esteban end up as outsiders in this micro-community. The sociology of the ravers is important because it immediately causes a clash between the worldly and the detached, the desperate search of a father in opposition to the conscious escapism of the ravers.

The next day, the rave is abruptly interrupted by an army unit. The soldiers force the partygoers to leave. During the ensuing exodus under army escort, a smaller group manages to break away. They head further south, towards the border with Mauritania, where a new rave is said to be taking place. Luis, desperately searching for any trace of his daughter, decides to join them.

Slowly, news from the outside world trickles in over the radio: war has broken out and masses of people are fleeing. The group witnesses the chaos at a gas station, where prices are skyrocketing. In a strange but intriguing scene, one of the ravers enters an abandoned house where a television shows images of the hajj: pilgrims circling endlessly around the Kaaba. The raver stares at it blankly. Is the film entering a more spiritual register? In the sequence that follows, Laxe cuts from the circling crowd to a person on crutches with one leg – a foreshadowing, as it turns out – and then to a pan over a road marking. The journey and the film are only just beginning. Over images of cars racing through the desert and accompanied by loud techno music, after half an hour of film, the title Sirât appears.

This opening and the choice to focus on rave culture suggest a wild, sensory trip. A recurring image reinforces that feeling: the camera is literally swallowed up by the speaker cabinet. Laxe also focuses more and more on the lifeworld of the ravers, who set the pace of the journey. The search for Mar slowly fades into the background. What initially seemed to be the driving force behind the story gradually dissolves into the commotion of the trip. Laxe leaves the more classic narrative structure behind in favour of a musically driven journey through the desert.

It should come as no surprise that Laxe himself has described Sirât as a mix of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and George Miller’s Mad Max. The film borrows its kinetic desert odyssey and fascination with vehicles from Mad Max. From Stalker, it borrows the idea of the “Zone”: an indeterminate space where the journey transcends the destination, where reality itself becomes a trial. This becomes clear during a second radio broadcast announcing that a global armed conflict has broken out. Earlier clues, such as the Arabic-speaking soldiers or the French-speaking announcer, turn out to be somewhat misleading. The realization grows that the desert Laxe shows us is unreal, almost science fiction-like. Despite a few concrete landmarks, the desert of Sirât is no more real than the apocalyptic no man’s land of Mad Max.

A clear echo of Easy Rider resonates in the abrupt and senseless death of Luis’s son, comparable to the deadly and violent ending of Hopper’s film. Esteban’s death makes an impression on the ravers: the shocking event shakes them out of the illusion that they’re free of worldly problems. The moment marks a break in the film, leaving the viewer bewildered. Nothing in the narrative foreshadows Esteban’s sudden death. Bearing in mind the reference to the Sirat Bridge, his fall from the mountain may be a first real trial.

What’s striking is the almost banal nature of the accident. This banality becomes even more apparent in the aftermath when the father, numbed by loss, takes drugs with the ravers and surrenders himself to music blaring from speakers in an open desert plain. The euphoria disappears suddenly though when they realize they’re dancing on a minefield. A series of grotesque explosions follows. “Jesus, I’m so high,” says a survivor as he crawls back into the car. This moment of absurdity seems to immediately undermine the spiritual commitment of Sirât, which until then had seemed extremely serious. Esteban’s sudden death and the minefield scene push Sirât in two different directions. You could even say that the film becomes two films in one. The first Sirât is about the obstacles of life and proposes a spiritual journey, a form of redemption or a moral test. This is the so-called crossing of the bridge, the razor-sharp edge. The second Sirât focuses on judgment, not redemption. The second film imposes an inexplicable, irreducible banality on the world, where even death loses its weight.

A key moment in this second reading, according to the Spanish critic Ali Huen, who poses a similar question in an article that can be translated as “Sirat: A Shitty Movie or a Thoughtful One?”,1 is when the ravers consciously shut themselves off from the events around them. One of them turns off the radio report about the outbreak of war. Up to that point, Sirât gives the impression that Laxe, as a filmmaker, endorses the ravers’ detachment by taking us on a musical trip, a journey towards redemption. But the ravers’ refusal, Huen argues, makes them ripe for punishment. Their escapism and “looking away” takes a negative turn.

Why does Laxe subject his characters to such cruel trials? Huen supports his argument by pointing to Laxe’s decision to have the ravers head for the southern border with Mauritania. After Spain withdrew from Western Sahara in 1975, Morocco occupied a large part of the territory, sparking a war with the Polisario Front. To secure its conquests, Morocco built a 2,700-kilometer defensive wall surrounded by minefields and unexploded munitions. In addition, Huen sees a disturbing parallel between the rave on the minefield and the events of October 7, 2023, when a music festival in Israel became the scene of extreme violence. Like that festival, held a few kilometres from Gaza, the choice of such a historically charged site embodies a radical refusal to engage with it. In both cases, the rave becomes a symbol of wilful blindness, a party on the brink of catastrophe. Both the choice of the militarised border with Gaza and the border landscape in Sirât would testify to extreme indifference.

If Laxe’s true subject is detachment and indifference, and his film is a form of punishment, then that results in a peculiar cruelty. In various interviews, Laxe says that Sirât arose from a “wound,” which he traces back to Gestalt psychology. “Art is pushing boundaries, spirituality is pushing boundaries, and that’s where you get to know yourself,” he says. The word “wound” also encapsulates the duality of the film: wounds can be healed and inflicted. Strangely enough, Sirât does both.

The final scene can be interpreted in light of this ambivalence. Only two ravers and Luis emerge alive from the minefield. A train cuts through the empty desert, with the ravers sitting anonymously among local passengers. In the first Sirât, the crossing is complete; the bridge has been crossed. The characters find their place in the world again, a form of redemption seems to have been found. But the second Sirât suggests that no redemption is possible. Surrounded by real people, at the end of the bridge, judgment awaits.

• 1Ali Huen, “Sirat: ¿Una película de mierda o una película reflexiva?”, La Izquierda Diario, 30 June 2025.