“Sirāt” Is a Harrowing, Exhilarating Dance of Death

But then, with seemingly on-the-fly artlessness, Laxe’s camera picks a few of the dancers out. There is Jade (Jade Oukid), a slender woman with dark-ringed gimlet eyes, a hoop earring, and a bowler hat. And here are Tonin (Tonin Janvier), a man with a warm, crinkly smile and a prosthetic leg, and Bigui (Richard Bellamy), who’s missing part of his right forearm and sporting a ratty Mohawk wig. In Laxe’s earlier films, most recently the drama “Fire Will Come” (2020), he has worked mainly with nonprofessional actors; he discovered most of the principal players in “Sirāt” at raves that he attended over the years. One notable exception is the superb Spanish actor Sergi López, who plays the protagonist: a heavyset, middle-aged man named Luis, who is introduced wandering about the rave with his young son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), and their dog. This clearly isn’t their scene. Rather, Luis’s daughter, Mar, disappeared months earlier, and he has reason to believe that she is here. No one has seen her, but in a conversation with several ravers—including Stef (Stefania Gadda), a woman of few words and immense gravity—Luis learns of an upcoming event farther south, toward Mauritania, to which Mar may be headed. In the distance, sandstone cliffs, as imposing as the outcroppings in a John Ford Western, loom over the unruly bacchanal—and over Luis and Esteban’s urgent search—with monumental indifference. By the time “Sirāt” ends, roughly two hours later, that sense of godlike impassivity has practically seeped into your marrow. We are still in the Sahara, although it’s not clear where. The characters, or the ones that remain, are bound for parts unknown, and any inclination toward revelry has vanished from their weather-beaten faces. But Laxe’s film—which won a Jury Prize at Cannes this year, and which Spain has submitted for the Oscar for Best International Feature—isn’t a cynical or nihilistic work. The movie begins in exhilaration and concludes in despair, and what unfolds in between is an experience of singularly turbulent and transfixing power; for sheer visceral excitement and sustained emotional force, I haven’t encountered its equal this year. It’s an extraordinarily propulsive piece of filmmaking, and every moment of it is suffused with feeling. For all its perils and cruelties, “Sirāt” doesn’t drain you or numb you into submission. I left it unsteady but invigorated, and grateful anew for the ground beneath my feet. The rave comes to an abrupt stop, and the story, which Laxe scripted with Santiago Fillol, takes off like a shot. Armed soldiers turn up and order the ravers to leave; the world, it appears, has plunged into violent chaos, though the doomsday specifics are deliberately vague. (When one character questions whether World War Three has begun, another replies, “It’s been the end of the world for a long time.”) As the party disperses, five ravers—Jade, Tonin, Bigui, Stef, and Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson)—break off and speed away, headed toward that other rave. Desperate to find Mar, Luis and Esteban impulsively join them. They’re driving a beat-up old minivan, less equipped for a long desert journey than the heavier-duty vehicles driven by their companions. But the nomads are moved by father and son’s plight, and by Luis’s gift of gasoline, a resource as scarce as water and food. Its visual and sonic magnitude notwithstanding, “Sirāt” is a drama of intimate exchanges and transactions, of improbable bonds forged under adversity and small blessings freely and unexpectedly given. Here, in these uninhabitable surroundings, Laxe taps into an oasis of communal feeling that transcends barriers of background and language. (The characters speak in snatches of Spanish, French, and, very occasionally, Arabic and English.) At one point, Luis assumes that he and Esteban have been abandoned, only to realize, with a start, that their newfound friends are actually circling back to help. In such moments, we grasp the source of the story’s mysterious power: a tough-minded understanding that kindness is rare yet persistent, and quite possibly an affront to the laws of nature. “Sirāt” is a chain of defiantly compassionate acts—noble human improbabilities that take on, in retrospect, an air of fatalistic inevitability. “Sirāt” drinks deeply of “Mimosas.” In both pictures, which were shot on 16-mm. film by the cinematographer Mauro Herce, a river is forded, an alternate path through the mountains is taken, and the road to salvation is found to be perilously narrow indeed. The Arabic word sirāt can refer to, among other things, the razor-thin bridge that leads, over the chasm of Hell, to paradise—a heavy burden of eschatological significance, but the film shoulders it lightly. The characters may be navigating a wind-scoured Purgatory, but Laxe is visibly captivated by the cinematic sweep of the journey: the dreamy nocturnal poetry of cars in motion, but also the gritty blood-and-sweat mechanics of the trek. When the group struggles to dislodge a vehicle’s tires from a precariously sloped, uneven road, we are mired in the treacherous terrain of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear” (1953) and William Friedkin’s “Sorcerer” (1977). As in those films, a car can be a shelter one moment and a trap the next. Death, though a likelihood from the get-go, nevertheless has a way of striking when least expected. What Laxe retains, and what Clouzot and Friedkin pointedly didn’t, is a sliver of hope in humanity. Even under the ghastliest of circumstances, the characters don’t turn on one another in a frenzy of bickering and backstabbing, as movie characters are often programmed to do. Just about the only remotely harsh words are spoken by Luis, in a brief, understandable fit of anger, after his dog ingests a raver’s feces, which contains traces of LSD. (The dose proves nonfatal, and far shittier times are still ahead.) What Laxe has orchestrated is not a simplistic clash of cultures but a collective upending of fortunes in which the rulings of fate, or of Allah, prove too cruel and too permanent to trigger a petulant blame game. Who survives and who doesn’t? The answers will surprise you. At first, we marvel at the ravers’ physical self-mastery, their effortless control of their copiously inked and scarred bodies. We’re tickled when Tonin, prosthetic removed, does a hilarious puppet act with his knee, and enthralled when, during a spontaneous joyride, Josh straddles two speeding vehicles, as if he were a War Boy from “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015) or Jean-Claude Van Damme doing a Volvo commercial. Later, though, it is Luis—portly, square, fish-out-of-water Luis—who, after a debilitating loss, seems to come into renewed physical command of himself. He’s probably never raved a day in his life, but, by the movie’s end, he’s the only one, you suspect, who could freestyle without fear. López’s performance is wondrous—doubly so for those of us who saw him as a sadistic Fascist captain in “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006) and vowed never to trust him again. Here, the actor tears a man’s soul apart and then, gradually, pieces a few bits of it back together. That’s the best any of us could do, López suggests, after we’ve lost everything in the world, except the world itself. All of which is to say that you should see “Sirāt” twice: first, for the swift, brutalizing shock of the experience and, second, for the lingering consolation of its spirit, and its insistence that the most meaningful families can be forged under the bleakest of circumstances. Laxe’s most resonant tableau isn’t a desolate landscape, or a fiery explosion, or another vision of Hell on earth. It’s Luis, Bigui, Jade, Stef, Tonin, and Josh asleep in a truck, their bodies wrapped around one another—silent and tranquil for now, but not, perhaps, in the shared rave of their dreams. ♦