Desert Mirages
by Leonardo Goi
New York Film Festival 2025:
Sirât
Dir. Oliver Laxe, France/Spain, Neon
In 2011, soon after the release of his feature debut You All Are Captains (2010), Oliver Laxe wrote the treatment for a new film. “A kind of crazy truck race,” he told Film Comment, his sophomore effort was to star “really freaky people in Morocco” and unfurl as a sort of riff on the Wacky Races cartoons. The project never saw the light of day, but the idea of a ragtag group of outcasts riding through the desert did. Named after the mythical bridge which in Muslim eschatology connects Heaven and Hell—“thinner than a strand of hair,” a title card warns, “and sharper than a sword”—Sirât tracks a few cars as they spring deep into Morocco’s arid interior. His previous films have also unfolded as shapeshifting journeys. In You All Are Captains, the director starred as a self-described “neocolonialist” filmmaker who travels to Tangiers to hold film workshops for local school children; Mimosas (2016) followed a caravan of nomads escorting a dying sheikh to his final resting place on the other side of the Atlas Mountains. Even Fire Will Come (2019), Laxe’s only feature not set in his adoptive Morocco, dogged a middle-aged loner as he returned to his native hamlet in Galicia after serving time for an arson incident. Yet Sirât might be the first in which the voyage itself takes precedence over the people who embark on it; the point here isn’t the destination or the shellshocked wanderers, but the conflagrations of sounds and visuals Laxe conjures along the way.
The plot is almost archetypal. Written by Laxe and longtime co-scribe Santiago Fillol, Sirât concerns a father who crosses a foreign land with his young son in search of his missing daughter. But the script shows little interest in supplying contextual information. We don’t know why the 19-year-old girl left, or how long Luis (Sergi López) and pre-teen Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) have roamed Morocco’s rave scene hoping to catch her among other drugged-up Europeans. It is during one such desert concert, amid bodies twirling under speakers as big as fridges blasting Kangding Ray’s “Amber Decay,” that Sirât begins. Laxe’s films have long probed the interstices between fact and fiction, and these opening sequences have an ethnographic feel, documenting the ravers’ dances as if they were tribal rites. They are also some of the film’s most hypnotic passages. For a work designed to unspool as a hallucinogenic vision, Sirât is never more convincingly trippy than when Mauro Herce’s camera captures bodies communing with Ray’s music; watching torsos and limbs contort against barren landscapes, more than once my mind wandered to the calisthenics of Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999).
The bliss is short-lived. A global conflict has just broken out, and the army is dispatched to corral all foreigners to the nearest airport. Undeterred, Luis and Esteban choose to venture deeper into the desert, joining a small gang of partygoers—Jade (Jade Oukid), Tonin (Tonin Janvier), Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson), Steff (Stefania Gadda), and Bigui (Richard Bellamy)—heading to another concert that Luis’s daughter might be attending. Laxe has worked with nonprofessional actors in all his features, and in casting five ravers with no prior acting experience, he continues his efforts to blur the line between the fictional narrative and the nonfictional backdrop. It also bears noting that two of them have missing limbs, a detail that heightens the quintet’s marginal position all while distancing Sirât’s party scene from others in the Burning Man vein. Laxe and Fillol craft these drifters as a makeshift family, but don’t seem as bothered to flesh them out as individuals. That their inner lives remain as out of focus as the war—which countries might be fighting or why are questions left unanswered—is because nothing in Sirât is more important than the ride itself and the hallucinatory spell Laxe wants to elicit.
Sirât sustains that spell through a miraculous alchemy of sounds and visuals. There’s a dizzying quality to Mauro Herce’s sun-scorched 16mm cinematography that dovetails with Ray’s music. Most of the score was sourced from the composer’s 2014 album Solens Arc, which mixes shuddering industrial soundscapes with more brooding, spectral tracks. As the vehicles barrel across rugged expanses and dusky vistas, propelled by Ray’s deep grooves, Sirât swells into a kind of desert mirage. The landscape isn’t some postcard-ready paradise but something closer to a forbidding wasteland. Some reviews have invoked Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953) and William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977) as key touchstones, but the filmmaker I kept thinking about was Werner Herzog. Early on, Luis’s car is fastened to one of the trucks and yanked across a river and up a slope in a scene that recalls Klaus Kinski’s own feat in Fitzcarraldo (1982); later, a drone shot finds the cars crawling ever so slowly down a steep mountain, a sight that brings to mind the opening of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). Sirât doesn’t evoke Herzog solely via the sheer physicality and danger of its journey, but through the tension between the terrestrial and the otherworldly, the perilous terrain and the suffocating sky.
After a tragic accident halfway through, the atmosphere and visual grammar change. As the mood grows more feverish, Cristóbal Fernández’s editing relies on frequent dissolves to tug the film into a dreamlike realm. Violence punctuates the voyage in jolting, unexpected outbursts. But while these moments are nothing short of jarring, I cannot quite shake off the suspicion that Laxe plays them for shock value. Vaguely sketched as they are, it is difficult to think of Sirât’s characters as anything other than collateral damage in the director’s mission to disturb and entrance; the hopelessness one feels is born from the structural situation rather than any genuine sense of who these people might be, or what they might lose en route. Laxe hasn’t always operated in such a broad register. Similarly elliptical, Fire Will Come, for one, was much more committed to plumbing its protagonist’s relationship with the tranquil countryside routines around him. Sirât isn’t as focused or specific; gradually, it sheds the initial magpie curiosity for the strange milieu and its denizens to become something much more elemental—a kind of art film fairy tale.
I first saw Sirât when it premiered in Cannes and was stunned by its majesty and technical achievement. With each subsequent rewatch, however, I began to wonder if Laxe was straining for transcendence. Everything in Sirât feels designed to put you into a state of awe: the imposing sight of mesas and buttes dotting the horizon, those vertiginous shots of vehicles hiking up and down the hills, and the horrific visions that pave Luis’s odyssey, perched somewhere between the imagined and the real. Laxe has a knack for standout sequences, though they often register as compartmentalized units, untethered to a larger whole. In retrospect, Sirât’s most visceral moments are also its smallest, scenes that do not seem engineered to trigger a slack-jawed response but come across as unscripted—as when, early into the ride, Luis and Esteban make fun of each other before bed—or captured on the fly, like a shot of a dancer hugging the speakers, lost to everything but Ray’s synths. To be fair, storytelling or characterization aren’t Laxe’s primary concerns. His interest, as he has repeated throughout the press tour, is in creating indelible images. “I wanted to make a film that expresses something from our time,” he confided to Film Comment, “that has the energy of this moment.” But if the film feels so attuned to our zeitgeist, it is not just because it sponges something of our apocalyptic era or our insouciant urge to keep dancing amid the rubble. It’s because Laxe melds his mystical filmmaking with a pop sensibility, crafting images that are both grandiose and somewhat hollow. By the end of the trip—both senses of the word apply—you’re left with handful of dust.