★★★½☆

Directed and co-written by Óliver Laxe, Sirāt has been making headlines during this year’s award season, earning an abundance of accolades including nominations for Best International Feature Film and Best Sound at the upcoming 98th Annual Academy Awards. 

The film tells the story of a man named Luis (Sergi López) who, alongside his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) and their dog Pipa, travel to a desert rave in Morocco in a desperate search to find his daughter Mar, who has been missing for five months. While giving out flyers to anyone and everyone at the event, Luis comes across a group of European ravers, who for the most part seem completely disinterested but offer information that Mar may be attending the next rave.

The party abruptly gets cut short when a group of soldiers evacuate the ravers, with inklings of a World War III type of event bubbling under the surface. The group of ravers, Tonin (Tonin Janvier), Jade (Jade Oukid), Stef (Stefania Gadda), Bigui (Richard Bellamy), and Josh (Joshua Liam) flee the soldiers in their van with Luis and Esteban quickly following suit in hopes that they’ll lead them to the next rave to continue their search for Mar.

The first half of the movie was lacklustre. While the first ten minutes of the film are a fantastic homage to raves and ravers, with gorgeous shots of people dancing, light shows in the desert, and the obvious sense of community in and around rave culture, once that ends, the story falls flat. The landscapes of Morocco were no doubt a beautiful backdrop to the film, but it took a while to pick up on the story where it ultimately felt like a dull road trip movie into nothingness. 

Thankfully, the second half of the movie, more or less, picks up the slack of the slow first half with an incredibly stressful, high tension narrative that leaves people in the cinema gasping and clutching onto themselves to regulate the intense emotional journey we’re taken on. While the unconventional group ventures through the desert of Morocco in a mindless and empty space, learning of each other’s drivers in life and morals, the tone shifts when a horrific accident occurs. This leaves the group in complete shock and turmoil at what they just witnessed, but they force themselves to continue forward. 

Finding a moment of peace and solace amongst the chaos, the group decide to set up an impromptu rave, where Luis seemingly for the first time understands the value of music. For the first time he doesn’t just hear the sounds, but he feels it in his bones, and is taken aback at the harrowing emotions his body goes through as he soaks in the moment. This fleeting feeling is cut short when they discover that they have found themselves in the middle of a minefield, only causing yet another setback in their trek.

This particular storyline makes this second half of the movie a perfect study in creating tension; not only through the characters onscreen, but through the choice in music and, for lack of a better term, explosive plot devices used to push the narrative forward in an unorthodox way. With the quiet hum of a complicated political landscape and the horrors of the world tumbling towards the beginning of a war, trickling in the shadows of the main plot.

It’s also something of note to mention that the only professional actors in the movie are López and Núñez Arjona, with the rest of the characters being discovered through a street casting process led by the costume designer and Laxe’s previous partner, Nadia Acimi, who is also quite dedicated to the rave scene. The choice in casting “real people” created an environment that felt more grounded, especially in a landscape where we need to rely on the relationships between people, leaving us with conversations that felt organic and natural to their characters. It was also a nice touch to have the characters’ names being shared with their given names, but I only wished for there to be more grit to the characters other than their exterior demeanour and post-apocalyptic sense of fashion.

Sirāt is a bleak and existential look into an unruly world and the questions we have when faced with unimaginable situations. You can’t help but feel a sense of anxiety when the film ends, but the movie does leave you with more questions than none. While it could be the intention of the filmmakers, the movie ends with a desolate resolution. Mar is suddenly forgotten in the chaos of the tumultuous second half of the movie as the movie shifts into a completely different narrative with an explosive climax.