Beneath the thudding bass and hiccuping synthesizers of the electronic music on its soundtrack, director Óliver Laxe’s Sirāt hums with menace. It’s there before any of its characters are on-screen, with a text prologue explaining that its title comes from a bridge that, in certain Islamic texts, links heaven and hell. “Its passage is narrower than a strand of hair,” the text informs us, “sharper than a sword.”
There’s more than a hint of self-importance to that opening salvo, and it continues through the turns of this portentous, heavy-handed thriller. The movie is itself quite thin and isn’t nearly as sharp as it thinks it is, but it’s made with a brutal, overpowering style.
It’s also about a descent into hell. It begins at a pop-up rave in the Moroccan desert, with a credits sequence of terrific energy and movement. Great walls of speakers blast pummeling EDM, and a mass of people roil and surge to the beat.
Amidst the drug-fueled revelry is a middle-aged father named Luis, played by Sergi López in a complete 180 from the deranged military captain he famously played in Pan’s Labyrinth. Luis does not fit into this scene. He’s soft spoken and inconspicuous, and he’s looking for his missing adult daughter. He has his younger son Esteban in tow, handing out missing person flyers to the mostly European ravers.
In between the bursts of music, there are reports of political violence in the distance, of bombings and police standoffs that could bring on World War III. Soon a military blockade interrupts the party, and Luis forms a caravan with five pierced and tattooed outcasts and follows them across the desert heading to the next party. They absorb Luis and Esteban into their group, probably because they were once missing children, too.
About an hour into Sirāt, something horrible happens, and it’s Laxe announcing that his movie has no guardrails on it, that he can torture his characters like a vengeful God, that he’s the new self-proclaimed provocateur of extreme yet existential European cinema. And then another horrible thing happens, and then another, and the limitations of Laxe’s premise start to reveal themselves. There are themes here of cultural tourism, colonialism, purity corrupted by violence, the cruel randomness of fate — and yet all it amounts to is a string of easy, gut-churning shocks. It’s much easier to get a knee-jerk reaction than dig into a weighty issue, after all.
What’s strongest about Sirāt is the ensemble supporting cast, made up of first-time actors and actual ravers. The best scenes in the film are the ones before the mayhem, when we see characters forming makeshift families in a landscape that sees them as disposable. The movie does, too.
Sirāt, which was nominated for a best international film Oscar and won a jury prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, has been compared to the white-knuckle French thriller The Wages of Fear and its American remake Sorcerer. But those films were about more than their violent twists, which Laxe applies to the audience like electrically charged cathodes. His provocations are ultimately empty and politically murky, but boy, does he wield a mean camera.