Sirāt
Óliver Laxe (2025)
In Islamic tradition, Sirat is the bridge that spans Hell and Paradise: text on screen at the start of Óliver Laxe’s film describes that bridge as thinner than a hair, sharper than a sword. In the event, this desert odyssey has more in common with words from Christian (or at least Miltonic) eschatology. With a fortissimo and sometimes disorienting soundtrack, the film is often pandemonium. The story that Laxe and his co-writer Santiago Fillol tell, ensures that sitting through Sirāt is, from start to finish, purgatory. In the pejorative sense of painfully unpleasant, that is – you don’t feel better for the experience.
Sirāt begins with six adults, one child, two dogs. Middle-aged Spaniard Luis and his pre-teen son Esteban are heading for a rave, happening somewhere in the deserts of southern Morocco, in the hope of finding Esteban’s missing sister. They hook up with a group comprising Jade, Tonin, Stef, Josh and Bigui – mates and dropouts, in their thirties and forties, who might be described as raving nomads; at any rate, they’re heading for a different rave in Mauritania. The dogs are Esteban’s Jack Russell terrier, Pipa, and whitish mongrel Lupita (she could belong to Josh though he and the others may not believe in possessions). When soldiers turn up and order all concerned to evacuate the territory, the raving nomads ignore instructions, driving their two big vans into mountainous terrain. Luis and Esteban follow in their smaller van. Radio news reports that a conflict between two unnamed countries has broken out and that World War III is imminent.
This viewer found Sirāt gruelling even while the characters’ problems were largely practical – running low on petrol and haggling to buy more, vehicles in potholes, and so on. The narrative starts to liven up, not in a good way, when Pipa briefly goes missing then is found unconscious. The raving nomads soon diagnose the problem – Bigui took drugs then defecated, Pipa ingested his LSD-infused faeces – and know what to do. They get the dog to drink milk (seemingly not in short supply) and she gradually recovers. It’s a short reprieve. On a mountain pass, one of the big vans gets stuck in a rut. Luis helps the other men get it going again. While his back is turned, his own van, with Esteban and Pipa inside, slides back down the slope and over the edge of a precipice, crashing far below. Crazed with grief, Luis wanders off alone into a sandstorm. The two women, Jade and Stef, rescue and revive him (water this time). To cheer everyone up, Jade gets them to join her in taking some kind of psychoactive drug and starts improvising a rave with two loudspeakers from the nomads’ sound system (which we saw being stacked in their vans at the very start of the film). Standing apart from one another, each of the six fellow-travellers moves to the music in their own trance. With punning prescience, Jade shouts ‘Blow it up!’ moments before she’s killed by a landmine under the sand. When Tonin instinctively heads in her direction, he’s blown up by another landmine.
By now, Sirāt is shaping up as a grotesque, politically pretentious take on And Then There Were None. It’s some relief that the casualty rate slows a bit in what’s left of the film. Both remaining vans are sacrificed in the survivors’ attempts to identify a safe path through the minefield. Luis then takes the initiative in heading for a rocky area, some sixty to eighty metres away (he and Bigui give different estimates of the distance), assumed to be mine-free. He makes it there safely; when Bigui follows in his footsteps, though, he’s blown up. Frightened as they are to move forward, Stef and Josh, with Lupita in his arms, manage to reach Luis on the rocks. In the film’s closing sequence, a train is shown moving through the desert. Those seated on the train roof are mostly Arabs, but Luis, Stef and Josh are among them (I didn’t notice Lupita but here’s hoping she was there too). The passenger train heads away from the camera into the vast, unyielding distance, aka a bleak future.
Sirāt has won numerous awards, including three at Cannes 2025 (the Jury Prize, a soundtrack award, a well-deserved Palme Dog for Pipa and Lupita). At this month’s Oscars, it’s nominated for Best International Film and Best Sound. It’s hard not to be impressed by Laia Casanova’s elaborate sound design or by Mauro Herce’s cinematography or by the commitment and endurance of Óliver Laxe’s main cast, only two of whom had prior professional experience. Those two are the reliably excellent Sergi López (Luis) and Bruno Núñez Arjona, who plays his son. For the most part, says Wikipedia, Laxe opted for ‘a street-casting process … Jade Oukid, a French photographer, amateur filmmaker and seamstress, was found at a festival in Portugal. Tonin Janvier, a French street festival performer, spent a significant part of his life in West Africa and lost a leg in a motorcycle accident. Stefania Gadda, an Italian rancher who lives off-the-grid, was found in the Spanish town of Órgiva …’ No mention there of Richard Bellamy (Bigui) or Joshua Liam Henderson (Josh) but the former is missing a hand and Google AI reckons that Laxe ‘intentionally cast non-professional actors with disabilities’. It may well be that the people on screen, except for López and Núñez Arjona, are essentially playing themselves. In any case, Laxe directs them skilfully.
That doesn’t count for a lot, though. At one point, Tonin uses his leg stump as the star of an improvised puppet show, and sings his companions a song, addressed to ‘Monsieur le président’, about not wanting to fight any more. This is presumably Tonin Janvier’s own composition, and his voice and verve are briefly elating. It’s the single moment where Laxe is making a point but making it entertainingly (Esteban really enjoys Tonin’s performance). Otherwise, I can’t think of another recent film I’ve disliked as much as Sirāt.
3 March 2026