Sirât review: Fury Road with rave vibes
Oliver Laxe‘s Sirât won the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and is currently nominated for the Best International Feature Film. I can see why people dug this film, but I came away feeling rather underwhelmed.
The film follows Luis (Sergi Lopez), who is looking for his missing daughter Mar with his son Esteban (Bruno Nunez Arjona) at a rave in the desert in Morocco. They come across a group of ravers – Jade (Jade Oukid), Stef (Stefania Gadda), Tonin (Tonin Janvier), Bigui (Richard Bellamy) and Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson) – who speculate that Mar could be at the next rave deeper in the desert. When that event is shut down by police, Luis and Esteban follow the group’s trucks in their small van through the desert to reach the next location close to the Mauritanian border.
Sirât is more of an experience than a film. It doesn’t have a traditional beginning, middle and end or much of a story in general. This is a road movie about vehicles driving through the desert to trance music by Kangding Ray (who should have been nominated for Best Original Score). It is Mad Max: Fury Road but with rave vibes and less action. It is more about the treacherous journey than the destination, and all about the atmosphere instead of story or character development. I enjoyed the vibes, but I needed more substantial, detailed characters in order to be fully invested.
But the film has my total respect for going to places I never could have expected. It’s not the movie you think it is and you’ll never be able to predict where this goes. For a long time, you think you’re watching a straightforward road movie/desert survival movie, but then something shocking happens out of the blue that changes the game entirely. You realise all bets are off and anything can happen. However, you’d expect a film like this to go out with a bang, but it’s more of a whimper – how underwhelming.
Sirât is an intense, bleak and unusual film with an incredible trance soundtrack that should be experienced in the cinema. Brace yourself for the unexpected ride.
In cinemas now