Sirât (2025)
In Islamic scripture, the sirāt is a bridge connecting this world to the next — thinner than a hair, sharper than a blade, hotter than fire. You cross it or you don’t. Óliver Laxe has taken that image and built a film around it, and the title turns out to be less a metaphor than a warning. This is cinema that walks you onto that bridge, removes the handrail, and watches with calm, curious eyes.
Luis (Sergi López) is a middle-aged man carrying the particular exhaustion of someone who has been worried for too long. He travels with his young son Esteban into the mountains of southern Morocco, searching for Marina, his adult daughter who vanished months earlier at a rave. Rumours of another gathering draw him further into the desert, accompanied by a loose convoy of nomadic European ravers — most of them non-professional actors, and the film is better for it. Their faces have not been trained by drama school. Somewhere in the periphery, a military conflict is unfolding. Nobody explains what kind. The film, frankly, has more pressing concerns.
For a good stretch, Sirât operates as a road movie with unusually distinguished taste in music. Kangding Ray’s electronic score turns the landscape into something between a cathedral and a threat, and cinematographer Mauro Herce, working in grainy Super 16mm, captures the Moroccan desert with a sun-scorched beauty that digital would have simply flattened into prettiness. The camera watches faces the way a thoughtful person watches faces at a party: attentively, without intruding. The film breathes. It allows silence. It earns your patience.
And then, without preamble or apology, it becomes a different film entirely.
The pivot is not telegraphed. It lands as sudden events tend to: without warning and with consequences that cannot be undone. From that point, Sirât sheds whatever residual warmth it had allowed itself and enters genuinely difficult territory. The questions it raises — about obligation, survival, the persistence of meaning when all familiar structures have been removed — are not delivered as dialogue. They are enacted through image and situation, the way the best films do it. In my opinion, Laxe is working in the tradition of filmmakers who believe the camera can think, and who trust their audiences to think alongside it.
López carries the whole weight of the film and makes it look effortless. His grief is the worn-in kind — habitual, undramatic, there in every pause. His relationship with the younger ravers, untethered from the world of responsibility he represents, never collapses into allegory, though the contrast registers on its own terms.
Where the film is, I think, genuinely vulnerable to criticism is in its script. Laxe and co-writer Santiago Fillol favour suggestion over grounding, and by the final act the opacity that earlier felt like intellectual honesty starts to feel, at moments, like a creative convenience. Some viewers will leave the film feeling less like they have witnessed something unresolved and more like they have been left standing in a car park after the event ended without announcement.
That is a real reservation, not a token one. It is also, in the end, insufficient to alter the verdict. Sirât is an overwhelming piece of cinema — morally serious, sensorially alive, and possessed of enough genuine strangeness to stay with you well past the point when you’d prefer it to leave.