Human traffic: "Sirāt"

So here, finally, is Sirāt, 2025's most heralded item of experiential cinema: cheered at Cannes, propelled around the secondary festival circuit on quite the wave of hype, and thereafter ushered up the awards-season red carpet as an example of what a more adventurous cinema can do. On some level, the new film forms a continuation of its Galician director Oliver Laxe's investigations into states of being. 2019's Fire Will Come set us down in the middle of countryside set ablaze, leading me to conclude my review by wondering whether Laxe was the Red Adair racing to the movies' aid or perhaps its sensation-chasing Keith Flint, armed with a camera and a large box of matches. Sirāt, which takes its name from the bridge said to connect heaven and hell, describes what it is to find yourself in the Moroccan desert for whatever reason; for any kind of enjoyment, take bottled water. This time around, Laxe sets us down among sweaty ravers - played, as we deduce from some of the haircuts and movements, by actual scenesters. They're here to party, as demonstrated by an opening setpiece that shows the group assembling and tesselating vast bass bins along a desert plain and thereafter unleashing a thumping wall of sound. (All of a sudden, my throwaway Prodigy reference in the earlier review doesn't seem so arbitrary: take bottled water and ear protection.) But there's also someone else in the mix: a portly, greying middle-aged man, played by the unmistakable figure of arthouse talisman Sergi López, who's pursuing a very different agenda. He's ventured this way, young son in tow, to search for a daughter who went missing from this scene some time before. This line of dramatic inquiry would be compelling enough in itself - here's a gatecrasher, someone where they wouldn't ordinarily be - but there's also something else going on, over the heads of the ravers and over the film's immediate horizons. All of a sudden, military vehicles show up to halt this apparently illegal gathering; as some part of this circus breaks off to roll ever deeper into the desert, the radio talks of explosions in the city, of refugees and war. Is it possible we've just been watching the last party on Earth?

That's quite some question for a film to pose, and at its best, Sirāt proves as rattling as everybody's said. (To put it in ravers' terms: it's ultimately a bad trip, but its highs are pretty high.) It's not merely what emerges from those bass bins, the sternest test of your local cinema's sound system since the last Michael Bay film; it's those devil-may-care partygoers, endlessly pursuing the next thrill. One sequence here, in which this party traverses the mountains via several miles of perilously bad road, triggered an ultra-specific stress response in me: memories of being on a nightbus caught up in chest-high flashflooding during a Spanish holiday in the 1990s. Then there are the bad vibes that follow, the growing sense everything's going to hell, via mountain pass, celestial bridge or other means entirely. (Does anyone remember when going to the movies was fun, rather than a test of nerve?) Laxe, in fairness, is keeping one eye out for companionship - a friend for the end of the world - in this case the unlikely companionship the genial family man, huffing and puffing his way up and over these hillsides, finds among angular shapethrowers with tattoos and piercings. In such stretches, Sirāt shapes up as among our more oblique migration movies: it recognises that, in times of upheaval, different worlds become fellow travellers, pooling money, intelligence and resources to ensure their survival. Yet even here, we're led to wonder whether the missing daughter fled because she found the normalcy the father represents too stifling, and whether any good can possibly come from a reunion. 

What the film centres, then, is a tentative alliance, riven with tensions at every turn: Laxe has basically found his way to filming those areas in Glastonbury where folks prepared to spend £1000 a night to house their family in a yurt while attending wellness sessions intersect with/rub up against those anarcho-syndicalist stalwarts who've shown up for the Corbyn speech and the Runrig reunion. Still, the film tails off badly; I'm amazed quite how seriously some have taken Sirāt, given the abject silliness of its closing section. At a crucial point - roughly once these drifters reach salt flats improbably studded with landmines - Laxe's film becomes less spiritual than logistical, veering into genre territory without understanding the terrain. It gets booming in a different way here - bombastic, really - and Laxe's po-faced direction finally strands his performers at the border of absurd and ridiculous: you half-expect Graham Chapman to wander on in the guise of corporal or copper, telling everyone to wrap things up and go home. The film's achievement lies in using its enervated characters - zonked figures in a landscape, looking off into the middle distance - to square the arthouse and the club, to find the unlikely centreground connecting, say, Antonioni with Tony De Vit. It's a fairly niche achievement, granted - some measure down on the countercultural landmarks of the 1960s and 1970s - but then the movies are fairly niche at the moment, so here we all are: there's a reason Sirāt hasn't leapt from the Best Foreign Language Film shortlist and onto the season's Best Picture lists as The Secret Agent has - and as It Was Just An Accident, a far more assured journey into the heart of authoritarianism and the desert of human despair, really should have.

Sirāt opens in selected cinemas today.