Sirāt Review: The Sound of Violence

In Islamic theology, As-Sirāt is the bridge to paradise that all souls must pass over on Yawm al-Qiyama, the day of resurrection. It’s with overt dark humor that French director Oliver Laxe references that passageway in the opening text before Sirāt, his fourth feature. According to the hadith, the faithful will cross the bridge easily, while the faithless will plummet into the hellfire below. His version of As-Sirāt offers no such promise of divine succor. Instead, the devoted and the damned are seemingly both at equal risk from the universe’s arbitrary whims. Any malevolence is purely the work of humanity.

Sirāt’s febrile, dusty sense of despair summons to mind Kristian Levring’s similar but more challenging The King Is Alive, the Dogme 95 outlier with Shakespearean actors lost in the Namib, reciting King Lear to each other. Sirāt has its own lost and wandering father, Luis (Sergi López, the sole professional actor in the cast). He is navigating a seemingly endless throng of rave kids, stoners, crust punks, hippies, hipsters, and burnouts in the deserts of Morocco. He and his son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), are searching for his missing daughter, Mar, who they have heard is attending a rave at the end of the world. Jade (Jade Oukid) and Stef (Stefania Gadda) take pity on Luis – or maybe see some of themselves in the photos of Mar – and encourage him to follow them to the next party, where she may have gone.

Terrifying forces are brewing, forces that the ravers are trying to keep at bay with the ecstatic rhythms of the sound systems that have been erected in the dust. Laxe, in conjunction with cinematographer Mauro Herce and composer David Letellier (recording as Kangding Ray), portrays the dancers as holy fools, literally entranced by the beats until sent packing to their next destination by military personnel.

Whatever our reasons, Laxe suggests, we are all idiots racing across the wilderness as reports of global conflict come across the radio. And in his world, violence is and has always been lurking around the corner. Tonin (Tonin Janvier) has lost a leg, while Bigui (Richard Bellamy) has a stump where his right hand used to be. Yet it’s unclear whether these wounds are omens or merely indicators of why they have rejected the regular world. “Is this what the end of the world feels like?” Bigui asks, only for Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson) to snort and retort, “It’s been the end of the world for a long time.”

The influence of the original Mad Max is undeniable – not the crazy biker bits, but the sense of a collapsing world, of the personal impacts and damage inflicted by the end of everything. The nihilist flight to nowhere becomes the sole purpose of the travelers’ lives, heading to the rumor of another rave somewhere even deeper in the desert just as Luis risks everything for the specter of his daughter. It’s also a seeming heir to No Man’s Land, Danis Tanović’s ruthless black comedy about being trapped in a minefield during the Yugoslavian civil war. Yet Tanović had sharper political instincts than Laxe and co-writer Santiago Fillol, whose intentions are more metaphysical than metaphorical. That’s why Sirāt sometimes leans more on style than substance, which works because its style is extraordinary. Letellier’s music, mixed for the screen by Laia Casanovas, curls over and around their plight, making its absence even more menacing in quieter scenes.

But then there is that aggressive, merciless bleakness that strikes at the halfway point, to the point of unintended ridiculousness. Laxe’s villain is the arbitrary universe, inflicting unearned horrors on the wicked and the innocent equally. His version of As-Sirāt is not a bridge but a seesaw, primed to fling any that cross to their doom.

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This article appears in February 27 • 2026.