Silent Roar
Katharina Hausladen
Still, Sirāt, Oliver Laxe (2025)
Although it won the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Sirāt, by French-Galician director, screenwriter, and actor Óliver Laxe, received comparatively little recognition both from critics and a broader audience. This may be because, as Robert Daniels wrote in Time Magazine, the white savior became this year’s cinematic punchline: from Paul Thomas Anderson’s burnt-out revolutionary in One Battle After Another (a romantic portrait in itself) to Ari Aster’s parody of the white Western hero in Eddington (brimming with anti-woke platitudes) to Kelly Reichardt’s spoiled wannabe art thief in The Mastermind (one of the most brittle and slowest films recently, proving most relevant to the current crisis of the left by indirectly addressing politics through news broadcasting).
Sirāt has a savior of sorts, too: Luis (Sergi López), a father who sets out with his twelve-year-old son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), to find his daughter, Mar, at a rave in Morocco after she disappears. The film, co-produced by MUBI, is a road movie in the tradition of George Miller’s Mad Max saga, featuring trucks driving through the desert on an existential quest. Unlike Mad Max, however, the trucks (or rather, the camping vans) are not driven by warring gangs, but by modern-day techno hippies moving from one rave to the next. To prepare the audience for what’s to come, the film opens with the sculptural setup of a monolithic sound system, as if it was designed by Mark Leckey. In the first few shots, we see hands stacking huge speakers into towers set against a massive ochre mountain range. Hands connecting cables. Hands flipping switches. Finally, the first booming bass notes ring out. The rave begins, as does the film’s journey.
Very much like Miller, Laxe rides two waves at the same time—two counterpoint ones on two different layers, to be exact: image and sound, as well as the characters’ inner and outer journeys (as for Miller, it’s image and sound, as well as hegemony and counterculture). Regarding the first counterpoint, the barren Moroccan desert landscape with its enormous Atlas Mountain ranges—or, more accurately, the Sierra de Albarracín Mountains, as the film was largely shot in Spain’s Aragón region—mirrors the ever-advancing and subsiding, mountain-like beats in Sirāt. Musically speaking, the landscape serves as the bass line, while the bass-driven electronic dance music (EDM) serves as the melody line. Though they remain independent, the two occasionally intertwine. It’s this meticulously edited (Cristóbal Fernández) relationship between cinematography (Mauro Herce) and sound (Kangding Ray) that establishes the rhythm at which the characters progress through the film. While the landscape remains virtually unchanged, providing a sense of slowness through long shots and the granular texture of 16mm film, the music provides moments of ecstasy and acceleration with its pure, blank, bass-heavy techno played at full volume.
The second counterpoint follows from the stark emptiness and roughness of nature which poses an existential threat to the characters, contrasting with the abundance of drama they experience together: Mar is still missing, Esteban is plunging down the mountain in a breathtakingly rapid sequence of unfortunate events, and some of the ravers—all of whom are non-professional actors—are dying or being stopped and taken away. The military has descended, dissolving the raves against the backdrop of a civil war breaking out. The desert is vast, dry, relentless, but in an abstract, rigid way. Sometimes there are roads, but most of the time, there aren’t even paths. In this timeless void, the characters gain experiences that exceed their capacity to cope, which is reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s minimalist storytelling. In his films such as Andrei Rublev (1966) and Stalker (1979), landscapes and other physical elements are perceived as uncontrollable metaphysical forces.
This interplay of minimalism and acceleration, emptiness and fullness, rigidity and movement is evident throughout Sirāt. So much is happening! Yet, the characters seem stuck in place, as if trapped in stasis. Processing his son’s death and his daughter’s disappearance, Luis—a lonely character in internal exile due to trauma—walks around the seemingly endless, parched desert, unable to hold on to anything, visually or otherwise. At this point, he cries out for the first time, externalizing his pain. In the next scene, he lies on the ground, curled up and asleep from sheer exhaustion while a desert storm sweeps across the arid landscape. The landscape remains calm when Luis is overwhelmed yet when he is exhausted and asleep, nature becomes threatening. In one of the film’s pivotal scenes, Luis and his hippie companions must carefully plan their next moves, as if they were pieces on a chessboard, after reaching an open field. As it turns out, it’s a literal minefield. But by the time they find out, it’s already too late. One by one, they are blown up, until Luis realizes calculation is pointless. He proceeds with his eyes closed, as if becoming one with the outside world. Like converts who have just witnessed a miracle, his remaining companions follow him, closing their eyes as well. And they survive.
The film’s spiritual, if not religious, undertone is obvious. The title, Sirāt, is inspired by the Sirāt Bridge. As explained in the opening credits, in Islamic tradition this bridge separates heaven from hell—where the soul is confronted with its true nature. Much like standing at the gates of hell, the film’s characters must face their greatest fears in the desert—a classic narrative trope associated with disorientation and sudden enlightenment. Indeed, Laxe, who tends to employ the clichéd notion of art as a form of religion in interviews, connects Sirāt, despite all the bleakness, to a humanistic belief. This becomes clear by the end of the film, when Luis and his fellow travelers sit with refugees on the roof of a freight train, embarking on a journey to an unknown destination. Every road movie must address this question: Will the journey eventually end, or will it be put off indefinitely? Laxe opts for the latter, transforming the trip into an escape and thereby altering its meaning—its cause and its purpose. Materialistically speaking, he links the historically indeterminate narrative back to present-day socio-ecological realities, such as resource scarcity, war, and displacement.
Furthermore, Laxe conveys the tension between the devoid-of-history desert thriller setting of the film and its departures to other places, both external and internal, primarily through the unifying force of the DIY rave culture. The ravers act as cultural intermediaries who shift fluently between English, French, Spanish, and Arabic. Thus, the raves represent subcultural communitarianism and transnational movements, but also a certain degree of archaism, portraying the ravers as adaptable prey. Like lizards, they operate in small groups and are experts in camouflage and polyamory, seemingly independent of economic or technological resources apart from loudspeakers, LSD, and trucks.
Laxe’s subculturalist plea has a strong anarchist touch: a living utopia of the never-ending rave. Unlike the fascist narrative, however, he does not portray the commune as a tribe or a sovereign authority that deems diversity illegitimate. In fact, the collective in Sirāt is a thoroughly contradictory entity that attempts to care for one another without claiming to be one. Conversely, the raves do not succumb to cultural optimism that views the pure enjoyment of collective dancing as resistance to the capitalist quest for reproduction. The opposite impression arises. As global living conditions become increasingly destructive, such cultural optimism seems hollow and ridiculous, belonging quite literally to a different era. For Laxe, partying isn’t pure escapism; it’s an ecstatic, religious-like experience—a worldly kind of mysticism, an atemporal limbo. Rather than depicting a traditional post-apocalyptic world like the one in Mad Max, Sirāt portrays life as a labyrinth or a cave in which the characters get lost, some forever. This may be the film’s only yet striking weakness. While Mad Max makes political struggle visible—a struggle of social classes amidst global ecological collapse—Sirāt implies that everything we do is the consequence of destiny’s unforgiving hand. But who will take responsibility for the devastated ecosystems on Earth? Should we trust that the landmine won’t go off? Bad idea.