It starts with hands, and bodies, and music. We’re somewhere in the middle of nowhere — more specifically, deep within the heart of the Moroccan desert. Men are stacking massive speakers on top of each other. They soon crackle and hum to life, a monumental metallic wall of sound reverberating off the base of a mountain range. Once the beat kicks in, hundreds of dust-covered dancers begin writhing together, though not in unison. Everyone here at this rave is very much on their own trip. And you, dear viewer, are about to embark on yours.
Taking its name from an Arabic word referring to the bridge between heaven and hell — “narrower than a strand of hair and sharper than a sword” — Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt is both a chronicle of paradise, in the form of a D.I.Y. dance-music scene that functions as a self-sustaining misfit community, and a mural of existential misery that would make Hieronymus Bosch wince. Our Virgil-like tour guide is Luis (Pan’s Labyrinth actor Sergi López), a middle-aged father searching for his M.I.A. daughter. He thinks she might have joined these nomadic ravers as they travel from one bass-drop oasis to the next. Along with his young son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), and their pet dog, they show pictures of the young woman to the dancers, asking if anyone has seen her around. None have.
Before Luis can canvas everyone, the military shows up to kill the buzz and the event. Political instability of an unknown origin is hitting a boiling point, and it’s not safe for these folks to be out here. Trucks and vans leave in convoys. Luis decides to follow one quintet who may be headed to another party a few days away. They are Jade (Jade Oukid), Bigui (Richard Bellamy), Steff (Stefania Gadda), Tonin (Tonin Janvier), and Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson). The fact that the actors and characters share the same names isn’t coincidental; Laxe recruited these nonprofessionals from the actual desert-rave circuit he’d become intimately familiar with over the past six years. No one is playing themselves, naturally, but the ease at which they navigate this treacherous terrain and their distinct style of gutterpunk chic is 100-percent their own.
Soon, the group adopt these strangers in a strange land, and all of them combine resources and forces to get to their next destination. The fact that WWIII seems to be happening just over the horizon line — news reports detail what sounds like an apocalypse already in progress — means they have to use the routes that run through the mountains, just to be on the safe side. The decision initially seems sound. It will result in the beginning of the end.
Laxe is the sort of artist who prefers mood over momentum, as well as a sense of dropping audiences within an environment in ways that feel dangerously immersive; Fire Will Come (2019), his drama about a former arsonist returning home, features a blaze so intense that the writer-director has said he functioned less as a filmmaker than an actual firefighter during those sequences. It’s not just that you feel the heat in these long scenes in the desert here, so much as the sheer isolation. These travelers might be in the Sahara or on Mars. Laxe has drawn from a host of cinematic influences in addition to his first-hand knowledge of the circuit — and his use of electronic-music composer Kangding Ray’s pulsing, mesmerizing score ensures you experience a second-hand version of the dancers’ collective ecstasy — including 1970s American road movies, head movies, vintage Euro-exploitation flicks and a sci-fi dystopian-wasteland scenario or two.
The actual genetic lineage of this meld of arthouse-slowburn vibes and meditative, lost-soul voyaging, however, is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. You enter an otherworldly zone once this trance-like thriller takes a serious turn around the halfway point. And Laxe ensures you do not leave untouched. There is an extended sequence we have not stopped thinking about since seeing the movie at Cannes this past spring, in which the gang decide to pull out their own speakers during a rest stop. The music kicks in, rumbling both the sandy plains and the seats you’re sitting in. (Did we mention this score is truly, madly, deeply hypnotic?! We did? Good.) What appears to be a cathartic release for these terrestrial astronauts is brutally interrupted. Healing turns into horror. It’s the entire film in a nutshell.
Anyone who found themselves without a compass at the phrase “arthouse-slowburn vibes” above has probably not just abandoned hope but already abandoned ship. Sirāt — which opened in New York this weekend, and will begin going wider starting next week — is not for everyone. But it is the sort of overwhelming cinematic experience and undeniable work of sound and vision that could be life-changing for those ready to receive it. It’s worth noting that the title of this instant cult-film classic doesn’t just refer to a bridge separating good and evil. The word also translates as “path,” with the idea that transformation awaits those who walk from one end to the next. Laxe’s movie makes good on that promise. It’s a trip in more ways than one.
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