Leo Goldsmith
In Oliver Laxe’s apocalyptic action spectacle, desperate end times
call for a desert rave.
Stefania Gadda as Steff, Joshua Liam Herderson as Josh, Richard “Bigui” Bellamy as Bigui, and Sergi López as Luis in Sirāt. Courtesy CMPR.
Sirāt, directed by Oliver Laxe, now playing through November 20, 2025 at Film at Lincoln Center, New York City
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Do you know where your children are? This question, cribbed from late-night PSAs on twentieth-century television, seems to have been haunting the cinematic hive mind of late. In the multiplex and on the film-festival circuit, the kids are missing, whether abducted or gone astray, and their parents, in turn, are on their trail. This missing-child trope carries with it a weighty set of themes: of intergenerational conflict and filial dissolution; of poor stewardship and a futureless planet. In films as varied as Zach Cregger’s Weapons, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, and Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, these searches are framed as alternately desperate, stoned, mournful, and aimless. Whether or not the kids are alright, the parents have drifted off course.
Offering its own take on this micro-trend, Sirāt, the fourth feature by the French-born Galician director Oliver Laxe, has the most satisfying answer: it’s the end of the world, and our children are at the rave. In the film’s opening moments, massive speakers are stacked against a jagged orange canyon that is soon filled with the dense, alien sounds of electronic dance music. Grungy, glassy-eyed figures pack the frame, cavorting and flailing to the earsplitting, bowel-shifting rhythms of a mass bacchanal. Soon, certain figures begin to attain definition—among them, a father, Luis (Sergi López), and his twelve-year-old son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), who are searching among the reveling throngs for Mar—their daughter and sister, respectively—whom they believe has wandered off to follow the endless party.
According to Laxe, sirāt is a classical Arabic word that literally means “path,” and indeed much of the film concerns the characters’ seemingly futile way-finding, forging ahead, and getting lost. But it’s movement nonetheless: Sirāt’s most repeated image is that of a caravan of buses careening laterally across a vast, desiccated landscape. Scored with dark, pulsating techno by French experimental composer Kangding Ray, the film propels Luis, Esteban, and a handful of the ravers forward through a progressively intense and slowly shifting set of moods—ebullient, haunting, anxious, and sinister.
Set in Morocco, but largely shot in the Aragón region of Spain (with the Sierra de Albarracín Mountains standing in for North Africa’s Atlas Mountains), Sirāt comes ready-made with a set of common signifiers of the desert. There are many syrupy dissolves of melting suns, and cinematographer Mauro Herce captures the arid vistas in sun-parched yellow-oranges and pastel blues. Laxe’s previous work as a director has often deployed adventure, either in the form of a journey—varyingly pleasant (2010’s You All Are Captains) or perilous (2016’s Mimosas)—or a battle with the elements (as in the massive and terrifying conflagrations in his 2019 film Fire Will Come). These movies are sparsely plotted and deliberately paced documentary-fiction hybrids, and thus fit squarely within the discourse of contemporary art cinema. But Sirāt is, by comparison, something more grandiose and self-consciously epic, an apocalyptic action spectacle whose back half in particular is structured around an increasingly grim and nerve-wracking sequence of events, catastrophes, and even explosions.
Sirāt is situated in the long and often highly suspect narrative tradition of Europeans abroad—from Heart of Darkness to Beau Travail. The film concerns rave culture, but this isn’t Detroit. It’s not even Ridgewood. This is not the hip, Black, queer rave scene, but something more white, European, and a bit gutter-punk, distinguished by a prevalence of crusty costuming and mangy dogs. Although white, these ravers also seem to exist in a kind of polyglot cultural interzone, freely shifting between English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, physically and ideologically unmoored from the Continent even as they retain some of its sense of privilege and mobility. Our protagonists often voice a naive faith in guidance or assistance, whether human or spiritual—an appeal usually met with brutal dramatic irony, as hints of a humanity-ending calamity reach them from off-screen via radio broadcasts. When one character suggests, “Someone should come and help us,” another responds, “There’s nothing but dirt here.”
Even so, Sirāt resists the easy gesture of overtly condescending to its characters. Geographically and metaphysically lost, they are nonetheless committed to their tiny provisional community of care and survival. And they are searchers—in one hallucinatory moment, a raver finds herself mesmerized by the sound and image of the Islamic call to prayer as aired on television from the Sacred Mosque of Mecca. The protagonists are less specified types in the psychological sense than raw receptors of feeling, and we, as spectators, experience this world as it steadily disintegrates.
And yet, the mostly nonprofessionals in the film’s cast are distinctive and charismatic, despite not being quite individualized as characters. (López is the only established actor among them.) We never learn about their pasts; even the ravers’ affiliations with one another are somewhat unclear. We don’t know how they met, if any of them are couples (or throuples?), or how at least two of them came to be amputees. One, the Muppet-like Bigui (Richard Bellamy), describes their dynamic as something akin to a chosen family—both as a point of contrast to Luis and Esteban’s consanguinity, and as a hint at the group’s hippie pseudo-tribalism.
The experience of the rave is widely noted for its capacity for the dissolution of the self and the body into the crowd as the deep churning rhythms are registered at the level of bone and viscera. It’s largely understood as a zone of pure affect—somnolent, nonverbal, and more than a little mindless. Drugs help, too, and they are appropriately conspicuous in this film: a joint is never very far from reach; a dog falls ill after she eats human feces with traces of LSD in it. Later, after a particularly harrowing incident, the troupe contends with grief and trauma with the help of a potent psychedelic. (“It might do us good,” one proposes optimistically.) All of this is naturally accompanied by throbbing electronic beats blasted at maximum volume into the empty desert landscape. It’s a desperate but earnest gesture of transmitting rave’s promise of collective trance and dissociation into the void. Perhaps it’s an appropriate soundtrack for collapse—whether of Western civilization or of an entire ecosystem. One character asks, “Is this what the end of the world feels like?” The answer: “It’s been the end of the world for a long time.”
Leo Goldsmith is a writer, teacher, and curator based in Brooklyn.