Sirát

Released 2025. Director: Oliver Luxe

THE WORD SIRÁT IN ISLAMIC CULTURE REFERS TO a bridge that every person must cross on Judgement Day to enter paradise. It's said to be thin as a hair and sharp as a knife, and hellfire burns underneath. Is Sirát a religious movie? I wouldn't say so. Label it what you want but it is for sure one of the best I've seen this year.

Many have described Sirát as a rave movie but there's a lot more than flashing lights and booming music. The combination of thumping bass and repetitive electronic dance beats is not exactly my genre. One sure sign that the movie has worked is how I felt completely absorbed into the soundtrack, which has a foundational importance to the story.

Reverberating through the movie is musician Kanding Ray's hypnotic soundscape that's dramatic, grand and mysterious. Rave, as I learned, is not just some party with a powerful sound system. Rave culture, to its true adherents, embodies peace, love and respect. People are not judged but celebrated for who they are. It's a community of disparate individuals in solidarity sharing a transcendental, maybe even religious, experience.

The movie starts with shots of huge speakers being stacked on top of each other, cables are plugged into amplifiers and music begins to fill the air. We're somewhere in remote Morocco where there's only sand and rocks on the horizon. Among the crowd transfixed by the music are two outsiders weaving between the swaying limbs. Luis is handing out photos of his daughter Mar, who never returned home after attending a rave a few months back. The worried, grizzled but determined father is helped by his young son Esteban but nobody here recognises Mar. Some of them mention an upcoming rave party in a deeper part of the desert and suggest they search there.

The next morning, the army descend on the area and order the crowd to disperse. Swept up in the disruption, Luis and Esteban join a breakaway group and speed away. Instinctively, troubled people have more trust in strangers in chaos than the authorities. In the coming days, they will drive across the deserts and mountainous terrains of Morocco and the story about finding a missing person will turn into something unexpected, devastating and transformative.

The group of seven traverses a brutal landscape. At one point they see a convoy of military vehicles pass at a distance confirming their speculation that a war has started. But where they are, there's no news updates and it's a world away from civilisation, with no proper roads or crossings, where a breakdown means abandonment and a minor misstep could have tragic consequences.

Luis and Esteban learn to trust their unlikely travelling companions Steff, Josh, Bigui, Tonin and Jade. They share food and water and look out for one another. In a conventional society these ravers appear more like fringe dwellers who probably have no fixed address or a regular job. One of the men is missing an arm, another one has a prosthetic stump but he has no problem dancing. All of them are resilient and have a hardened appearance. In an alternative universe they would be in a Mad Max movie, one with music instead of weapons.

Before they reach their destination, a series of shocking events will disrupt their journey. I say shocking because they come out of nowhere. And even now that you know, when you see the movie for the first time they will still shock you. The first time is an accident, the second is horrific, followed by the dread that it might not be the last.

The senseless cruelty of life is a blow that pushes Sirát to the edge. The literal and metaphorical search by the intrepid seekers is brought to an abrupt end, as if a greater power is mocking their futile pursuit. The last shot of a mass of faces, packed on open carriages on a train rumbling across an expanse of desert, is an antithesis of the joyous abandon at the movie's start. Sirát is about loss and broken people. It's about hope and despair, about dancing while wounded.

The kind and paternal Luis is played by Sergi Lopez, the same actor who played the evil Captain Vidal in Pan's Labyrinth. Most of the cast are non-professionals who likely enact a version of themselves as rave devotees, completely in their element and at one with their environment both physically and aurally.

Director Oliver Luxe uses the sprawling landscape and the enveloping sound to create an immersive storytelling. The sun rises, the sun sets; music rises, reverberates, falls away, coaxing us into the human details against a stark, allegorical setting. Whether you take this as simply an apocalyptic survival tale or something more abstract and metaphysical, there are moments in Sirát you'll find hard to forget.

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