DAN WEBSTER:
Luis is on a mission. Along with his 12-year-old son Esteban and their dog Pippa, he is searching for his daughter Mar who disappeared after attending a desert rave in the recent past.
And that’s pretty much all we know at the beginning of Sirāt, a 2026 Oscar nominee for Best International Feature Film. Even as the film progresses over its near-two-hour running time, we never learn a whole lot more.
Here’s what we do know. The film was directed and co-written (with Santiago Fillol) by French-born filmmaker Oliver Laxe, and it stars Sergi López as Luis and Bruno Núñez Arjona as Esteban. The rest of the cast is made up of non-professional actors drawn from a number of disparate professions.
Whatever their principal occupation, though, they all look the part of itinerant revelers, people who seek out whatever rave they can find to dance to pulsating rhythms (the film’s music was created by the French electronic musician David Letellier, who performs under the name Kangding Ray).
In this case, the rave is being held in a remote desert location (the film was shot both in Morocco and northeastern Spain), and we see Luis and Esteban moving amid the rave attendees, handing out photos of Luis’ daughter and asking those they encounter if they’ve seen her. But none have, including a group of travelers that the two befriend.
When the rave is interrupted by a troop of soldiers who stop the music and order everyone to leave, we discover that a war is being waged. Referred to at one point as World War III, this adds a whole other level of complexity to Laxe’s film. Then as the soldiers monitor several dozen RVs full of ravers as they leave the desert in a long parade, two vans driven by Luis’ new-found friends suddenly break away—and he impulsively follows.
That’s when the heartbreak, punctuated by sudden acts of violence, begins. Laxe, born in Paris to parents from the Galicia region of Spain, isn’t interested in giving us a mere road-trip adventure. He isn’t interested in creating anything close to a standard story at all. Because from the moment Luis takes off after the others, Laxe begins to explore what his film’s title signifies.
"Sirāt" translates from the Arabic as a word for “path,” “way” or “road.” In Islamic theology, it refers to the metaphorical bridge that separates the physical word from Paradise. That bridge is said to be razor thin, and only the most righteous among us are able to cross it while those who fall off tumble into what the bridge is set above: the depths of hell.
Yet even given this source material, Laxe—whose studies of Gestalt psychotherapy have involved taking LSD and ayahuasca and which go hand in hand with his practice of Sufism—doesn’t settle for anything remotely simple. His Sirāt is what he describes as a film full of “a kind of white sorcery.”
Which is bound to intrigue some viewers while confounding others. Even those who find it difficult to bond with what Laxe is trying to communicate, though, are likely to be impressed by how he unveils his story.
Other than Letellier’s haunting musical score, the cinematography captured by Mauro Herce—including scenes set not just in Morocco’s Sahara Desert but the reddish clay of Spain’s Rambla de Barrachina—are at times breathtaking.
And while the solid performance of López is to be expected, those of the non-professional cast members end up being even more poignant. López is perhaps best known to American audiences for playing the villain in Guillermo Del Toro’s masterpiece, 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth. But Jade Oukid, for one, not only looks the part of her character but she proves convincing in the few lines of dialogue Laxe gives her to deliver.
In the end, what Laxe is trying to say with Sirāt might not match what his title suggests, especially in terms of separating the righteous from those destined for an eternity in hell. But he certainly succeeds in one respect: avid film fans are likely to spend hours in bars, coffeehouses or even just at home arguing what they think the film means.
Which is why some of us go to the movies in the first place.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio.
