Oliver Laxe’s apocalyptic desert thriller SIRĀT opens with images of a giant sound system being erected. Once set up the speakers stand totemic, framed within a wide shot of the desert mountains. However, as the droning bassline of Kangding Ray’s score begins to warble, the camera shifts to shots of the landscape itself – the kick drums start pulsating and before we see the crowd of ravers our focus is pulled towards the imposing walls of the vast mountain landscape surrounding them. The desert rave, Laxe seems to wish to remind us, is only a transitory moment, a delicate bubble of temporary techno-induced epiphany, dwarfed by an uncaring and foreboding environment of vaster, more permanent forces.
Arriving at the rave is Luis (Sergi Lopez), a father who, along with his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), has ventured into the North African desert in search of his daughter. They stick out as alien figures, wandering among the revellers, handing out flyers in search of any leads on the whereabouts of their missing family member. However, they find no answers and are forced to move on once the authorities shut down the event. Unwilling to give up their search and hearing rumours of another rave, they decide to keep looking, tagging along with a nomadic group of lost-soul European techno-chasers, to form an unlikely convoy.
“SIRĀT is a film that purposefully defies expectation or strict genre classification.”
SIRĀT is a film that purposefully defies expectation or strict genre classification. Beginning as a ‘found-family’ road-trip drama, it abruptly morphs into a painstakingly tension-fraught thrill ride, punctuated by moments crafted to shock and awe. Crucial to the tension is the film’s sound design, which delivers nerve-rattling moments of explosive intensity. Ray’s electronic score pulses throughout, oscillating between guttural thumping techno and quieter, more ethereal moments of ambient droning. The sonic contrast underscores the film’s loftier thematic exploration, established through the opening title card: the Arabic word ‘Sirāt’, we are informed, refers to a bridge, narrow as a hair, linking heaven and hell, through which all must pass. As our story unfolds, it appears that, so far as Laxe is concerned, if we are to reach transcendence, the prerequisite involves plunging fully to the very darkest depths.
As SIRĀT’s vehicle-bound descent grows more extreme and the landscape more gruelling, there are echoes of William Friedkin’s SORCERER in the close-ups of struggling truck wheels overlooking vertiginous heights and the night photography of spectral headlights passing through unforgiving terrain. The infernal physical journey through Earth’s extremities is similarly made a metaphor for reconciling the internal struggle with living in a chaotic and indifferent world. For Laxe, this chaos, which will plague the film’s characters, is inherent to nature, but also found lurking in the scattered signs of human intervention in the barren environment they travel through.
“As our story unfolds, it appears that, so far as Laxe is concerned, if we are to reach transcendence, the prerequisite involves plunging fully to the very darkest depths.”
The spectre of armed conflict persists, simmering in the background of SIRĀT; however, the extent to which Laxe’s film wishes to engage with the reality of a real, violent and continuing history of the disputed territory of Western Sahara is unclear. Certainly, there is a concerted depiction of the Western protagonists’ attitudes to conflict as one of willful ignorance – symbolised most bluntly in a scene where one character casually switches off the car radio blaring out news of the war unfolding around them. This exploration of the horrors of the external world, how they crash against and penetrate our interiority and how we may transcend them, permeates a film unmistakably germane to our current moment.