Reposting from Filmleaf NYFF/MVFF coverage (Sept. 12, 2025). Showing at Lincoln Center currently (Nov. 13, 2025) alongwith Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent and Ira Sachs' Peter Hujar's Day.



The crooked path

This is an absolutely stunning film about what becomes a desperate journey across the Moroccan Saharan desert. It won the Cannes Jury Prize this year for Oliver Laxe. It's undesirable to reveal too much about how it turns out but let's start with the title. "Sirât" (صراط) means "path" or "way" in Arabic and occurs in the most often repeated part of the Holy Qur'an, the "Fatiha" or "Opening," in the line that goes, "Show us the straight path, The path of those upon whom You have bestowed favor, not of those who have evoked [Your] anger or of those who have gone astray." "Those who have gone astray" is ٱلضَّآلِّينَ "al-dhâlîn," meaning also "those in darkness," or even "the evil ones." The film starts with a desert festival or rave, then Luis (Sergi Lopez) and his young son Esteban (Bruno Nuñez Arjuna) begin to follow in their van people making a difficult trek across the desert to another rave. They are searching for Luis' lost grown daughter. It is an ill fated journey. The electronic musical soundtrack is essential and haunting. This is an experience, the kind of film that makes me remember why I love cinema, how it can change me and be unforgettable, even after many years of watching.

The initial rave itself, from set up of the rough enormous speakers to the disbanding of the illegal event by truck caravan of the Moroccan military, is itself such a bone-numbing and haunting event that you might think it would overwhelm the rest of the film and story that consists of a small trek of several big vehicles and the little van of Luis, which is ill suited to this difficult terrain. But you would be wrong, and this is where the brilliance of Laxe's construction and storytelling is revealed. Eventually what happens on the journey is so shocking and disturbing it very well holds its own. At the same time the rave continues to haunt you. It is a scene so strange, so wrong, yet addictive and compelling enough to be the black hole into which the young and vulnerable, like Luis' daughter might be swallowed.

Again, remember the soundtrack, which makes the rave also echo in your ears, for the "music," it's pointed out by one traveller in the little band Luis gets desperately jointed to, isn't music but pure vibration, a hypnotic shaking of your soul.

Reviews commonly jump to this film's "existential quest" or "lost soul" aspect, but I want to stress that while such implications are hinted at even from the title itself, this is above all a supremely visceral experience. It might remind you of other famous films of doomed journeys like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Wages of Fear, but it ups the ante big time. In the light of this viscerality and the wake of a blunt, visceral, doomed story with life-and-death stakes (some of the best of Hemingway also comes to mind), the occasional hints of a "Third World War" or end of the world happening outside strike a slightly wrong, artificial note in the film, while they do also have the value of showing how these people are shut off into their own claustrophobic and narrow world.

That world of Luis and Esteban expands, yet sets its limits with the band of rave-groupies they are joined to and depend on once the journey starts. This is a gnarly crew of tattooed, dead-end misfits. One lacks the fingers of one hand, another has a peg leg (and these aren't CGI disfigurements). Steff (Stefania Gadda), Josh (Joshua Liam Herderson), Bigui(Richard Bellamy 'Bigui'), Tonin (Tonin Janvier), and they form a Spanish-French European union, because they seem to mix the two languages, giving a sense of this as a haphazard yet strong community, where each is defined yet embraced for their peculiarities.

Where Laxe triumphs is in the intense physicality, stone, sand, water, metal of trucks, a huge damaged tire, the closeness of an embrace, all the little band huddled together in a truck to sleep, and then, physically frightening yet beautiful, the desert itself, "shimmering," as the cliche goes, but indistinguishable sometimes from a vast opaque sea into which one might fall and be lost forever. Sirat rocks you between the specific and the infinite, providing an experience both wonderful and terrifying.

This is a genre, if one can call it that, that's deeply appealing but not for everyone. The Oscar Expert, who loved it most of what he saw at Cannes (till Sentimental Value came along, perhaps), noted that some in the audience around him were not moved as he was and just didn't get it, and that can happen. But this is a masterpiece of its kind and one of the year's most distinctive films. It's the kind of riveting experience that may even make you review your own life as it makes its journeyers review theirs. It conveys Werner Herzog's message about how easily humans overestimate their power over nature.

Sirat, 115 minutes, premiered at Cannes in Competition, winning the Jury Prize, also showing in many other international festivals including Toronto and New York, for the later of which it is reviewed here. Metacritic rating: 84%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.