Sirat features a striking image near its start: a haphazard array of speakers piled on top of each other in the Moroccan desert, forming a giant, misshapen wall of pumping sound, set against a backdrop of sheer cliffs. It’s appropriate for a movie in which music has both a metaphysical presence and seems to emanate from deep within the earth. The title refers to an Islamic parable about a precarious bridge that stretches over hell, en route to paradise, which explains why writer-director Oliver Laxe begins in the immanent before wandering off into the existential. A father (Sergi Lopez) arrives at desert rave in search of his missing daughter and ends up on the road with a caravan of itinerant partiers—a journey that evoked, for me, both Dante’s Divine Comedy and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The filmmaking is hypnotic, thanks partly to Kangding Ray’s thumping score but also to the early long takes of revelers in motion, as well as later, mesmerizing images of vans rolling across vast landscapes and open roads. I’ll leave it to you to discover how these pilgrims fare in the face of increasingly absurdist despair.
(12/8/2025)
