Sirāt (Oliver Laxe, 2025)

[Never Cursed]

Hoping Reichardt comes through because the Mendonca Filho film is the only competition entry so far that both interests me and has been well received.

Do you not like Oliver Laxe? I didn't know about him at all prior to the festival, but Sirat sounds very interesting (and even has the ultra-elusive Nanako Tsukidate seal of approval)

[zedz]

His previous film Fire Will Come was superb. I don’t know why anybody wouldn’t be interested in seeing what he does next.

[Finch]

I've not followed arthouse cinema for years, to be honest. I'd not heard of Oliver Laxe before this festival.

[colinr0380]

Related to the above, for any UK members Film4 is going to be showing Fire Will Come at 1.40 a.m.(!) in the early hours of Tuesday 27th.

[therewillbeblus]

SIRAT (Oliver Laxe, Spain, 2025) – Laxe sure knows how to open a movie. Here he sets up the location and the premise, and introduces all the main characters in a visually and sonically astounding sequence (a rave in the Moroccan desert), then swiftly moves on to the next – and only – thing, an escape into the unknown. What better place to spend the end of the world than a place that isn’t even a place (Western Sahara)? The journey becomes more fraught and more hallucinatory as it goes on. McGuffins are jettisoned. Stark, beautiful and tense as a motherfucker.

Kinda non-specific spoiler

Spoiler

The film delivers what feels like the most shocking moment I’ve seen in a film. And the second-most shocking.

This was a fantastic, treacherous ride filled with unpredictable narrative turns, even though you know it's going to be intense going in. As if a young Bruno Dumont took a stab at The Wages of Fear with some more realistic Mad Max iconography thrown in, the film is pitched to the beat of defeatist energy ironically sown into an enlivened, free-spirit subculture; gradually becoming both more intoxicated with its madness while acutely sobering to its state of being.

Spoiler

The camaraderie of people helping people can only go so far in a vast, enveloping, overwhelming mass of wasteland, which can serve as a microcosm for our global cultural, social, political disillusionment and powerlessness. All one can do is try their best, but it's not enough. The final shot could not be more tragic, and yet it's significantly the one moment in the film that's 'stable' - a train simply going its course, directional and purposeful on an actual track, but still devoid of all hope.

And boy do I agree with zedz - though I'm unsure what his ranking is, I'd say the first shocking moment had my mouth agape for a solid couple minutes in disbelief. I've never seen such a nonchalant (or, more appropriately, stylistically-removed) delivery for a soul-destroying plot point in a movie before, but it couldn't be a more true to life perspective of the event. Absolutely devastating.

This movie is not for the faint of heart

[zedz]

One, then two, but the thing with two is that you assumed that one was enough.

Spoiler

I've thought about why the first shock is so devastating. It's not as if we haven't been anticipating disaster, but despite that Laxe uses some very deft misdirection.

1) We have been primed - even in this very sequence - to expect something to happen to the dog. And Laxe overdelivers, so we're taken aback by the scale of the shock. (Also, the typical pattern is "and then there were none", with the cast being picked off one by one in order of importance, so this particular victim shouldn't have been first on anybody's dance card, according to genre conventions).

2) The specific circumstance is common enough in action films, but it's always delivered as a suspense sequence. Here, there's no teetering, so we're shocked by the swiftness and finality of it. Even when the car starts to roll, you don't expect it to just go straight over the edge. So it's a very "un-movie" shock, and the kind of thing that usually only happens in real life.

The second big shock, as I alluded to above, works so well because we expect more bad stuff to happen, but we can't imagine that the film would be able to pull off the same trick twice, our guard now being up. But again, Laxe misdirects us by setting up what seems to be a completely different kind of scene, so that when it happens, at first I couldn't even properly process it. Have we entered a dream sequence? Of course, it was actually a really obvious threat, considering where the characters were, but Laxe had been smart enough not to allude to it earlier in the film. So he traded off some heightened ambient menace for ONE BIG JOLT.

[therewillbeblus]

That's a great first point and 2 is well said, it's exactly what I was alluding to above by its stylistic removal. As I think harder about this movie, the more brilliantly constructed it seems, and I already find myself wanting to watch it again despite saying "I'll never watch this movie again" to myself multiple times during my viewing

[Never Cursed]

Deadline posted the screenplay for this today, and it's one of the more interesting reads of this year's crop of films so far. The content of the movie only runs 52 pages, and there's bits and pieces from earlier versions too (including having some of Jade's material spoken by "Olga"). Was curious to see how some of this movie's more intense moments were communicated on the page

[Soy Cuba]

It's a good film. One of teh years best. Mad at times and shocking at others.

[vertigo]

Horrible picture, horrible director's vision of the world, horrible perroflauta people and world, I don't agree with Laxe's speeches, and I suffer this terrible and horror present times.
I really laughed and laughed and laughed very much

Spoiler

each time when they die.

It is a long, boring, nasty and empty movie.
The desert is beautiful, but sadly was full with those perroflautas

Crusty? Dogflute? What is a trustafarian?
I have to auto-censor my words for not getting a ban, imagine what I feel.

[Mr Sausage]

As thrilling and shocking as blus and zedz have said. I think this might outdo The Wages of Fear. It certainly pulled me along.

I've seen a number of post-colonialist readings on Letterboxd, and while the movie gives opportunities for that kind of reading, I found them unconvincing, especially when they began to argue that the characters deserved all the things that happened to them, which is a grotesque logic. Instead, I want to read the characters in quite another way:

Spoiler

In Ancient Greek there's the word ekstasis, which meant a standing outside of oneself. The followers of Dionysus would drink wine, ingest psychoactive substances, and stomp along to rhythmic beats and musical patterns to induce ekstasis. It was a form of religious trance, a way of exiting formal social boundaries to achieve something irrational and unconstrained. It was spiritual. Pretty obvious where I'm going with this: the desert ravers are not neo-cololialists, but spiritual searchers for ekstasis, for a way of exiting the boundaries of modern society and their own consciousnesses.

I believe at one point in the movie there is a tv image of pilgrims at Mecca. By extension, our ravers are pilgrims, seeking some vague, semi-mythical rave 'beyond', which can stand in for anything from the holy land, to paradise, to the underworld, what have you. The missing daughter is already theorized to be there, maybe a holy grail at the other end, maybe a dead girl already in the underworld. The vague political conflagration that the ravers ignore sets an appropriate apocalyptic tone: the ravers seek spiritual ecstasy as an antidote for a chaos they cannot control, or seek a final spiritual apotheosis as the world ends.

Here's the trouble: it's exactly in searching for a desired end that they are undone. The first suggestion that forward momentum brings disaster is the child being pulled backwards as if by an invisible force just at the moment the truck is cleared to move forwards. When the remaining characters reach a plane of peace and erect their own altar from which to achieve ekstasis, to work off their emotional and spiritual anguish, the movie starts blowing them up. From there, any attempt to pick a specific destination and move purposefully towards it results in the hand of god blowing people and things from the world. It's only once Luis abandons any specific purpose or destination and just walks, empty minded, in a direction, that the explosions stop. Bigui's attempt to follow directly in his footsteps, ie. walk purposefully to a destination, has him blown to pieces too. The final two make it by following Luis' example, proceeding with eyes closed and purpose abandoned. The movie ends with all three being carried along to a destination they don't know and that the shots of the desert suggest may not exist. Maybe their journey is infinite, or they're being ferried to the land of the dead. Rather than driving to a specific spiritual destination, they survive annihilation by finding ekstasis in purposeless, undirected movement. A pure state of transition.

It's worth remembering that the awful journey begins when the characters break out of the military's attempts to herd them like animals to some destination, suggesting that their torments begin not with colonialist behaviours, but with the belief they can direct their own journey, find some sort of salvation, when the world offers no real chances for control or understanding. Whether the remaining characters' final ekstasis is a spiritual gain or an ironic reversal, they have undoubtedly given themselves over to forces they cannot control pulling them in directions they cannot know. They are left where a lot of us feel we are right now.

[aox]

This was surprisingly great, and I can't stop thinking about it. I was rolling my eyes the first 15 minutes with the father and son walking around the rave/burn ground looking for the daughter, figuring that this was going to be the whole film for two hours. Then the film is off and away, and it completely sucks you in. Having personally spent a fair amount of time with characters like this, I found it to be a non-cartoonish three-dimensional portrayal of what these people are generally like in these settings.

As for the end:

Spoiler

The loss of their vehicles/home is legitimately heartbreaking, as they most likely will never recover (funds) to continue their lifestyle off the grid. And, I can think of no more perfect use of the Mauratanian train snaking through the naked desert as they lurch defeated back to the real world. Great use of that prop and setting.

[tenia]

Wish I liked this but nope. I found the darkness of it all more button-pushing than anything because once you reach the midpoint twist, whatever I can happen I guessed (and was wrong), but also because I found the acting not to be up to the parts, including (to my surprise) Sergi Lopez, unfortunately and especially when there was no place for acting approximation.

Once you factor this, the movie feels tedious rather than hypnotic.

[nitin]

thanks for that spoliered post Mr Sausage, mirrors my thoughts exactly but I couldnt have written that as well as you did

[bearcuborg]

Horrible picture, horrible director's vision of the world

I really laughed and laughed and laughed very much

Spoiler

each time when they die.

I have to auto-censor my words for not getting a ban, imagine what I feel.

This movie didn't elicit this exact feeling from me, but I didn't love it either. The sound design was a lot of fun, and Jade Oukid has a striking presence. Her scene explaining speakers was probably the best thing in the movie. But yeah, I laughed too and not in a good way. Overall, I'd rather see the better films that inspired its creation...