Oliver Laxe’s Sirât: The Fine Line Between Beauty and Terror
Chama Al Houari (f. 2002) is an aspiring filmmaker from Morocco and Montages’ editorial assistant. She is currently living in Oslo, and is passionate about film history and how movies reflects the world.
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Cannes 2025: Oliver Laxe’s new film Sirât opens in Dionysian madness, sweaty bodies, and the sound of acid bass blaring through the dry vastness of the Moroccan desert. Anarchic, psychedelic, and uncompromising, Laxe moves through the texture of the underground like second nature.
Sirât is above all a sensorial journey — an audiovisual pilgrimage. Here, music and image are cohesive forces guiding us down a trance-like spiral, rather felt than understood. But the film is more than a techno-fueled fever dream; it belongs to the timeless tradition of odysseys, where travel is as much a spiritual transformation as a physical path.
Among the rusted desert ravers, two silhouettes are out of place — a disoriented father named Luis (Sergi López) and his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona). Together, they search for Mar, Luis’s daughter who has gone missing. Suspected of having run off to one of these secluded desert raves, she leaves a trail of dust for them to follow. They stumble through the crowd, asking sedated strangers for clues. In a place built on the fantasy of transcendence, their urgent search feels intrusive and revealing — exposing how quickly communal ecstasy turns cold when faced with individual suffering.
Beneath the hypnotic veneer of freedom, a tension lurks like a disaster waiting to happen. The gathering is brought to a halt at the arrival of the Moroccan military; war is brewing in the region. The entrancing music abruptly stops, and all are ordered to evacuate the area. Along the road, a few of these nomadic vans break off the trail — still hoping to reach the next party down south. Clinging to the hope that he might find his daughter there, Luis follows them.
The breakaway drivers turn out to be a skeptical crew of seasoned ravers: Bugui, Stef, Josh, Tonin, and Jade. These performances are strikingly authentic, likely due to the fact that they’re playing themselves in name and spirit. The group warns Luis and Esteban that this will not be easy — yet the two remain determined, driven by desperation or perhaps a kind of faith. Much like Dante in the dark wood, the characters drift into hostile territory, unaware of what the journey demands. What seems to be a road movie slowly spirals into descent.
The wilderness of the desert becomes an indifferent arena where the line between beauty and terror blurs. Death arrives as an irreversible rupture, a tonal shock. The silence which follows is a deafening void. Like the awakening of an inevitable doom just beneath the surface, what began as a family adventure turns into something more primal.
Caught between hunger, grief, and the dissolution of meaning, the group is drawn into inferno. The loss of self is no longer an idealised state, it becomes an inescapable torment. When very little stands between being and nothingness, man is revealed in his impotence. And following the logic of the spiritual odyssey, this is not a punishment — but a trial.
The film’s most diabolical scene unfolds towards the third act, when the group attempts to set up an ultimate rave, a final act of revolt against the callousness of nature. Unmoved by this deluded gesture of hope, the earth beneath them strikes back in full fury; they have wandered straight into the heart of an active minefield.
What little they have left collapses as death strikes mechanically; each step becomes a mortal gamble, and one by one they fall to aimless blows. The odds of survival are close to none, yet a few of our protagonists miraculously reach the other side of danger, as if guided by a knowing force. This metaphorical salvation comes with no catharsis or explanation — only the very same silence that followed horror. They are rescued off the side of the road by what appears to be Mauritanian refugees, once deemed peripheral figures, now a humbling grace.
Laxe leaves us with the idea that we attempt to lose ourselves, hoping to find the rhythm of the silent vastness. It works for a while, but that rhythm was never nature’s, it is ours; a temporary fantasy. What remains is what was always there; dust and heat — the realization that the earth does not always answer back. Nature not as something to be naively admired but a force indifferent to the scale of man — we exist only at its mercy.
In Islamic belief, As-Sirât (Arabic: الصراط) is the bridge that every soul must cross on the Day of Judgment to reach Paradise. It is described as thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword, suspended over the fires of Hell. Only the righteous will cross it safely; the sinful will fall.
This is the descent: the unveiling of nature’s other face. The coin tossed between violence and meaning, between rhythm and silence. This purgatory is where we thread the Sirât between ecstasy and despair. The horror lies in how quickly the switch flips, the fact that it is both — but only ever reveals one side at a time.
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