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We are all merely the playthings of a callous God. If there’s one thing that both the people in and the people watching Oliver Laxe‘s extraordinarily strange and nerve-wracking “Sirât” can agree on, it must be that. For the characters on this purgatorial journey from the middle of nowhere to the back end of beyond, that God is the unseen force that gradually thins their number, saps their spirits and forces them to consider the idea of life after hope. For the viewer, it might very well be co-writer-director Laxe himself, as he pummels us emotionally and psychologically in ways we can’t predict, and have done little to deserve. To be clear: this is both a heavy caution and a high compliment. Not many movies can trigger your flight instinct while rooting you to your seat.
An array of battered speakers is being assembled in the Moroccan desert. Though dwarfed by the spectacular dusty canyon walls nearby, the sound they produce — the first of composer Kangding Ray’s astonishing pieces, a growling bassline that grinds like tectonic plates massing against each other — matches them in grandeur. If these cliffs could speak it would be in this subwoofer language of pulsing beats and techno drones. Suddenly the empty desert is filled with writhing, gyrating bodies, beautifully yet truthfully shot by DP Maruo Herce, their old tattoos and sunburnt scars, their braids and studs and ragged tees emphasizing that these are no Coachella selfie-takers, no Burning Man tryhards. A blissed-out, drugged-up vibe of acceptance and bacchanalian euphoria reigns; the only thing you could do to stick out here would be to show up looking normcore.
Enter Luis (superb Spanish veteran Sergi López, one of the few professional actors in the cast) and his son Esteban (Brúno Nuñez), both almost the definition of middle-class normalcy, although their mission is peculiar and sad. Going person to person among the ravers, they hand out pictures of Luis’ daughter Mar, from whom they haven’t heard in over five months. Following a lead that suggests she might be part of this scene, they’re disappointed that no one knows her, until Jade (Jade Oukid) a sympathetic attendee with punky black-line face tattoos, tells Luis that there’s another rave scheduled soon, at a venue far away across the desert. Then the military arrive ordering an evacuation, and that’s how we learn that civilization is on the brink of World War III.
Setting a missing-girl mystery against the backdrop of the Free Party movement, at a moment when geopolitical tensions are approaching apocalypse stage, is already an intricately interesting idea. I’t’s brought vividly to life during the film’s first hour, as we meet more of Jade’s cohort. Steffi (Stefanian Gadda), Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson), Tonin (Tonin Janvier) and Bigui (Richard Bellamy), who between them are missing an arm and a leg and who apparently live in their industrial trucks roving from desert party to desert party, reluctantly become a surrogate family to Luis and Esteban, as the former elects to give the military the slip and follow them to this semi-mythical second rave.
There follows some gentle fish-out-of-water dramedy, when Luis’ minivan proves unequal to the tough terrain, and when Esteban’s little doggie Pipa is afflicted by a passing illness, the suspected cause being LSD-laced excrement. And with just enough warm bonding moments to convince us that the film has swerved from its missing-girl premise to become an offbeat, techno-driven found-family road movie, it’s hard to convey how jaw-dropping it is when, right after the halfway mark, an eviscerating tragedy occurs. It’s like getting chopped in the windpipe. From then on “Sirat” (ominously named after the hair-thin bridge that purportedly connects heaven and hell) is never exactly straightforward, never exactly ordinary. It moves into ever wilder, more bizarrely existential and allegorical territory, as even the most off-grid, self-sufficient, nomadic existence is revealed to be a construct that can be dismantled, piece by piece.
What happens when we lose everything? (And Laxe really means everything.) Do we become beasts or angels? Do we revert to a state of grace or a Hobbesian state of nature — nasty, brutish, etc.? The film provides no answers but plunges nightmarishly onward into the questions, changing form at will as though, here at the event horizon of global meltdown, all the regular rules and codes have started to warp and bend. And not just the rules of life, but the very laws of filmmaking and storytelling logic as well.
So to call the film chameleonic rather undersells the gonzo thematic transformations Laxe engineers – chameleons, after all, merely change color. “Sirat” repeatedly undergoes something closer to transubstantiation, becoming an unholy (in the best way, because remember, God is callous) amalgam of “Mad Max,” “The Wages of Fear” and roughly half of Michelangelo Antonioni’s ’60s and ’70s output.
Yet somehow, Laxe’s preternaturally firm grip on the tone of escalating devastation (which culminates in an absurd, borderline ridiculous climax that is simultaneously one of the most cower-behind-your-fingers tense sequences in recent memory) never falters. This thrilling directorial confidence, given his film’s elegant opacities and ambiguities, is a quality to marvel at, even as it’s binding your hands and tying you to your seat and forcing you to watch, possibly against your will. “Is this what the end of the world feels like?” asks Bigui at one point and yes, it kind of is. But although the despairing peri-apocalyptic world it evokes is one in which everything is ending, falling away, burning out, blowing up, turning to dust and dying, “Sirat” is something new.
English (US) ·