Sirât: Oliver Laxe’s thrilling desert parable lets the music take control

• Reviewed from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival

Evangelists for theatrical moviegoing tend to emphasise its superiority as a visual experience – “see it on the biggest screen you can” – and Óliver Laxe’s Sirât, shot in the remote desert of northern Morocco, is certainly a sight to behold. But more than that, it’s an auditory feast – one that should be consumed at maximum volume. Sirât opens at an illegal rave in the shadow of the mountains, where throbs of deep bass reverberate off the rock and shake the audience into a trance state beyond conscious thought. 

Shortly before opening night of Cannes 2025, the festival released an announcement heralding the installation of Dolby Atmos in the Grand Auditorium Louis Lumière, making it the largest theater in Europe to feature the immersive surround sound system. Some have suggested that this infrastructural upgrade was necessitated by the arrival of Mission: Impossible — Final Reckoning. But, with apologies to Tom Cruise, it’s hard to imagine a better showcase for the Lumière’s new capabilities than Sirât. 

The film’s sound design, mixing David Letellier’s dance music score with howling wind, ambient rumble, and the occasional shocking explosion, continues at the same teeth-rattling density throughout its two-hour runtime. It locks into a groove that feels appropriate for Laxe’s sensorily told and intuitively narrated parable, one roughly concerned with humankind’s relationship to the sublime. 

In the film’s opening credits-sequence, dancers throw shapes in unself-conscious ecstasy. The camera singles out five dancefloor veterans whom Laxe has known for a decade through the Free Party movement. As in his previous film Fire Will Come (2019), Laxe builds his story around nonprofessional actors with unconventional physical presence – weathered faces and sinewy bodies, as well as multiple missing limbs – speaking to a life spent embracing an alternative lifestyle. 

Also on the dance floor, though not by vocation, is Luis (Spanish actor Sergi López), who has come to Morocco, along with his preteen son Esteban (Bruno Núñez) and their terrier Pipa, to search for his daughter, Esteban’s older sister, who left home five months ago and hasn’t been seen since. But what starts as a The Searchers (1956) riff – a desert odyssey about a father in pursuit of a fugitive daughter lost to some unfathomable Other – quickly shifts when authorities arrive to shut down the rave, due at least in part to some unspecified but near-apocalyptic global crisis that lingers offscreen like the morning sunlight outside the doors of the club. Gridlocked in a convoy of evacuees, the five ravers break away in their two jerry-rigged trucks and speed across the desert en route to another party somewhere around the Mauritanian border. Luis, still in search of his daughter, follows in his smaller van. 

Jungle is massive but so is the Sahara: the trucks carve their path through the arid, staggeringly empty expanse, driven on by their own soundtrack, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) style. The ravers and the searchers warm to each other, Luis and Esteban soon welcomed into a found family built on positivity and good vibes – Esteban even gets a crusty half-rattail buzzcut. But the demands of this journey are existential, and the stakes tragic. As in Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953), and (more specifically) Friedkin’s remake Sorcerer (1977), to which Sirât nods with harrowing cliffside-hugging drives on narrow mountain roads, nature is indifferent, and death is meted out arbitrarily. 

To what end? Laxe staged another spiritual quest through the Moroccan desert in his 2016 ‘Muslim Western’ Mimosas, and here likewise he has executed a high-degree-of-difficulty shoot in which the cast and crew traverse rocky and windblown vistas past the edge of human civilisation, reaping gorgeous visual rewards. The word “sirât,” an opening title card informs us, is an Islamic term referring to the bridge, narrow and treacherous, across which we might pass between heaven and hell. 

In Laxe’s ravishingly distilled film, this concept is brought to life with a shot of trucks teetering on the brink of oblivion, and random moments of violence. It’s also dramatised by a hypnotic scene, late in the film, where characters explore a perilous landscape on blind faith, like a cartoon character suspended in midair after running off a cliff, seemingly kept alive only through their surrender to the rhythm of the universe, which in Sirât embodies in every shake of a subwoofer, stirring body and soul on a preverbal level. Let the music take control.