THE STORY – After his daughter disappears at a rave, Luis travels to Morocco with his son to search for her.
THE CAST – Sergi López, Bruno Núñez, Richard Bellamy, Stefania Gadda, Joshua Liam Henderson, Tonin Janvier & Jade Oukid
THE TEAM – Oliver Laxe (Director/Writer) & Santiago Fillol (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 115 Minutes
Oliver Laxe’s “Sirāt” opens with massive speakers being set up for a desert rave in Morocco. Any regular rave attendee knows that the massive music parties are a perfect melting pot of people. People are having the best time of their lives, and people are having the worst time of their lives. People are high on all different kinds of drugs, and people are mellowing out. Rich people, poor people, young and old. And there are always the people who clearly don’t belong there. Those people at this rave are Luis (Sergi López) and his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez). They’re there in an attempt to find his daughter, who has been missing for five months. No one has seen her, but a group of ravers tells them of another rave happening soon that she might be at, and when the area gets evacuated, Luis decides to follow them to it.
As a sensory experience, “Sirāt” is a stunner. The bumping score by Kangding Ray is pumped up loudly enough so that you can feel the extra reverb in your bones as it bounces off the rocky cliffs surrounding the rave site. As the film shifts into a road movie, the engine roars, and tire squeals take over with the force of machine gunfire in a war movie. The sound mix completely envelops you, putting you right in the middle of every scene, as if you’re at the rave or in the cars with these characters. Laxe locks you into the characters’ perspectives so tightly that he’s able to successfully pull the rug out from under you not once, not twice, but three times with genuine surprises that make you sit straight up in your seat in sheer terror and shock.
The problem with those surprises, though, is that each of them completely changes the film’s narrative direction, and not in particularly interesting ways. While they make for thrilling, emotional highs in the moment and offer up space for engaging narrative and character developments, Laxe mostly just lets the events sit there, teasing the possibility of something interesting happening before moving on to the next scene. The film’s opening text references the Sirāt as a bridge between paradise and hell, and the journey Luis and company undertake ends up staying on that bridge, spinning around in circles, never making any headway.
That’s precisely the point, of course. After breaking from the evacuation route from the rave, the characters always turn the news off whenever it comes on the radio, preferring to focus on their own personal goals instead of the larger dangers in the world around them. They’re stuck in a kind of limbo of their own making, endlessly searching for something they will never find. Unfortunately, the ravers aren’t as well-defined as Luis, despite the amount of time we spend with them. The performers, all of whom are non-professional actors, have plenty of charisma and are fascinating to watch. Still, we barely learn anything about them, making it hard to connect with them in the same way that we connect with Luis and Esteban. We don’t know what they’re searching for other than the next rave, and why they’re into rave culture at all is never addressed. Laxe treats them more like pieces on a chessboard than characters, moving them around in different configurations to get the story to go where he wants without caring about why they’re doing so.
In Laxe’s defense, “Sirāt” is one hell of a ride through hell, even with those missteps. The electronic score, used in continuously mesmerizing ways as the film goes on, pulls you ever closer into the action, and cinematographer Mauro Herce uses the desert landscape and sunlight to create some indelibly heady images that make the endless desert feel like its own isolated hell cut off from the rest of the world. It’s a cinematic experience most akin to “Mad Max: Fury Road,” of all things, except it takes place in something much closer to the real world. All the craftspeople working on “Sirāt” are firing on all cylinders, but their great work is in service of a half-baked story about characters we mostly don’t have a strong connection to.
At any good rave, there comes a point when your body completely gives over to the music, and it becomes unclear if you’re dancing to the music or if the music is dancing with you. At its best, “Sirāt” captures that feeling unlike any other film, but it’s hard to give yourself over to it when the film is lacking this much heart. Still, Sergi López gives his tormented character his all and as far as big screen experiences go (with the loudest sound system you can possibly find), there’s nothing else quite like “Sirāt.”
