Sirât

Most every year, there's a film that encapsulates and sums up the state of the world, or at least how contemporary Western culture and its economy have impacted the state of the world, to a tee. In 2024, it was Radu Jude's Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. This year's film with its finger on the pulse of contemporary society ain't One Battle After Another; it's Oliver Laxe's Sorcereresque journey into the spiritual, psychological, and metaphysical heart of darkness in the most brightly lit of places.SIRÂT, which means"path" in Arabic, follows a middle-aged man named Luis (Sergi López), who arrives at a massive outdoor rave held in a mountainous southern desert in Morocco with his son and dog, seeking his daughter, who disappeared at another rave several months prior. When soldiers shut down the party due to a war breaking out nearby, Luis and his son decide to join a strange family of nomadic hedonists who drive deeper into the harsh desert in search of the next party.

I have no idea if Laxe meant this as an allegory for the impending end of Western Civilization as we know it, but it certainly plays that way. The film appears to have been willed into existence by non-actors playing themselves as the ravers. We can see by their tattooed, sun-baked, weather-beaten faces and bodies that most of these ageing partiers, some of them missing limbs, are used to roughing it, but the father and his son, who join their odd convoy, are novices. Soon, everyone is in way over their heads. We don't particularly like any of these characters, but they are undeniably compelling and sympathetic. The situation they find themselves in seems to be entirely of their own making, yet we wonder if things would have been all that different if they'd stayed on the road more traveled with the rest of the pack, like they were supposed to.

The film is a feast for the eyes and ears, shot in the dry, dusty, vast location on Super-16mm by cinematographer Mauro Herce, with a resonant techno score by Kangding Ray, and sound mix that brilliantly blends natural and man-made sounds; silence with shouts, screams, and explosively loud jolts; wind, rain, stillness, and all kinds of other surprises. This winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes and Spain's submission for the Best International Feature Oscar may not be for everyone, but it sure got under my skin.