Sirât review: a tempestuous work of brilliant cinematic art

Sirât, the immaculately staged near-apocalypse from Oscar-nominated French-Galician filmmaker Óliver Laxe, has no interest in easing you in. Or out.

Instead, as the film opens, we’re thrust headlong into a juddering blast of bone-crunching bass that annihilates our senses. A fortress-like barricade of towering speakers is arrayed at the foot of a cliff, somewhere in the southern Morrocco end of the Sahara. A light show dances on this foreboding canvas as a drugged-up throng surrender themselves to the beat.

Through this unruly desert dance party, a frantic father, Luis (Sergi López), searches the crowd, looking for his missing daughter. He’s accompanied by his young son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), and their adorable pup, Pip.

At first glance, this sand-swept rave might look like heaven for a hedonist. But there are troubling signs that all is not well with the world beyond this vast carnival of gay abandon.

A world teetering on the edge

Snatches of radio reports suggest that the globe is teetering on the edge of a great conflagration. Soon, soldiers bearing machine guns roll in on trucks. Is this the not-exactly-calm before the storm that crashes us from the original Mad Max and into its post-nuclear apocalyptic sequel, where gas and water are as priceless as gold? Is this geopolitical collapse or local uprising?

We’ll never know. Instead, we just have to go with the film’s wild and wired swings. But even in this dangling question mark, an inalienable truth can be told. As one of our band notes, ‘It’s been the end of the world for a long time’.

We find ourselves stuck in Limbo. The clue’s in the name, after all. Sirât is the Arabic word for the impossibly slender bridge that spans the endless chasm between a foolhardy soul and the gates of paradise beyond. Can Luis and Esteban navigate this treacherous passage and reunite their family?

The tempest

A tempestuous journey, Sirât forces father and son, increasingly desperate, to latch onto whispers. There might be another wild rave across the wasteland, so they embark on a wild goose chase.

Falling in with a caravan of party animal misfits – played by Jade Oukid, Stefania Gadda, Richard ‘Bigui’ Bellamy and Tonin Janvie – theirs is an unusual band of brothers and sisters in techno.

Discovered on dance floors, these non-professional actors bring a difficult to fake authenticity to this fast-shifting world. Much like Ridley Scott’s Alien, we rapidly invest in every one of these wandering souls, who shine bright on the big screen and form a found family of sorts, even as the world inexorably slips from their grasp.

And oh, will you gasp at the trials that await them as they pursue this torturous route. It seems as if it might be all over before it truly begins, with Luis’ car barely able to cope with the unforgiving terrain. But the bonds fast-forged with the hippie brigade includes the use of their handy tow bar.

Pulling and pushing us, Laxe’s odyssey will dig deep into impossibly cruel horror, high on a mountain range hungry for broken souls, through raging rivers and blasted spaces where the legacy of war can erupt at any moment. Along the way, hope and despair blur into one, occasionally giving way for dark comedy so dense it consumes light like a black hole.

Watch the trailer

Eye of the beholder

A stramash of sound and vision, painted like a Turner, Laxe’s Sirât, co-written by Santiago Fillol, signals much about the parlous state of our darkening days.

With an eye for the epic (led by Endless Night cinematographer Mauro Herce, working on gloriously grainy 16mm) and an ear for the alarming (by composer Kangding Ray), Sirât pushes every button and then some. We feel every bloody beat viscerally, every loss like flesh cut from our own bodies.

When Luis wonders aloud that, ‘This makes no sense. We shouldn’t have come. What do we do? … We’re lost,’ he may as well be speaking for all of us cast adrift in this astonishingly immersive feat.

Laxe threads a needle both through the eye of heaven and the gates of hell, mired in our worst natures, to land in a place where worlds torn apart can nevertheless lead to the promise of some small measure of grace for those who hold on against the odds, and where a hand held tenderly in another can shore up even the most distraught of lost souls. 

Guided by Laxe, we cross that tightrope walk, rewarded if not by paradise, then at least a ravishing work of art that understands cinema offers a feeling as much as meaning. A Rorschach test of sorts on which will bleed whatever you need to see, Sirât is a mighty endeavour that will thunder on in your mind long after the light has faded, and the last blaring note fallen silent.

Sirât is released in cinemas on 26 February.

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