Cannes Review: Oliver Laxe’s Desert Trance Sirat Is a Grand, Adventurous Achievement

For the French-Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe, a competition berth in Cannes has been a long time coming. Laxe was here in 2010 (You All Are Captains), 2016 (Mimosas), and 2019 (Fire Will Come) without once going home empty-handed, and he now rises to the occasion with Sirat, his grandest, most adventurous work yet: the kind of bold, auteurist arrival that seems to happen more here than any other festival. The story takes place in Morocco, which provided the backdrop of Laxe’s first two films, and follows a father searching for his daughter amidst the dust and drugs of an illegal rave scene in and around the Atlas Mountains. There’s a delicious touch of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore to that setup, but Sirat is more in the lineage of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, even Mad Max: a story about a ragtag group attempting to move some monstrous vehicles over a landscape so unforgiving it might actually be hell. If I see a better film in Cannes, it will have been a very good year.

The only thing that beats the lightning bolt of discovery is seeing a filmmaker build on it with each passing work, stretching out to explore the further reaches of their talents. Laxe sets the tone of his latest with a bravura opening-credits sequence: first, close-ups of hands assembling a wall of speakers; then, as the beat ominously comes in, a cut to an aerial shot of gyrating bodies. DP Mauro Herce here enters the fray, documentary-like, to locate the main players. We meet the colorful raver crew of Jade (Jade Oukid), Steff (Stefania Gadda), Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson), Tonin (Tonin Janvier), and Bigui (Richard Bellamy)––two of whom are missing limbs––then finally Luis (Sergi López) and his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez), both looking lost, tired, and bewildered. When Jade, a fellow Spaniard, shows them some kindness, a desperate Luis takes it as a sign to tag along to the next party, regardless of whether his hatchback can handle the terrain. When armed soldiers arrive and announce that the country is at war, Jade pulls her M911 truck (Friedkin used the M211) off-road with the others close behind.

López has a wonderfully consistent record in Cannes, appearing in Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro and Albert Serra’s Pacification—two of the best films in recent years and worlds that similarly seemed to teeter between our own and the next. Sirat takes its name from the Arabic word for “path” and the bridge between heaven and hell, described in an opening quotation as “thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword.” Such allusions to the ineffable abound in Laxe’s film, which finds images of crossings in the most unlikely places. We see one projected in dazzling lasers onto the face of a mountain, and later in the tweeter of a loudspeaker that Herce (who has worked on all of Laxe’s features as well as Lois Patiño’s otherworldly Samsara) creeps towards as if being swallowed by its gravitational pull. This sense of a world receding from view soon works its magic on the characters, who react to news reports of society collapsing and, worse, with admirable pragmatism.

It’s not the only time speakers are treated as sacred objects: in an incredible sequence around the midway point, Jade invites Luis into her truck to show him one she’s been working on. At first he’s ambivalent, but when she cranks the volume (creating vibrations I’ve never seen on 16mm film before), Luis seems to catch a glimmer of why his daughter might have become immersed in this world––not that Laxe’s film would be so simplistic as to allow such an obvious moment of clarity. That glimmer will appear at other times, not least when he sees how Esteban has become enamored with their new companions. It would be sacrilege to give any more away.

Buoyed by unforgettable images and a guttural, pulsating score from producer Kangding Ray, Laxe sets his film’s cosmic stakes so convincingly that its closing sequences (of which we will say nothing) initially caught me off-guard. I’ve seen the film twice now, first at a rapt press screening and then in an IMAX just outside of town. I wanted to hear the bass shake the walls of the theater and see those vistas on a screen as big as a building––not least the phenomenal opening sequence, but also the distant shots of the vehicles at night, visible only from their headlights, creeping across the desert or carving a line through the rockface of the Atlas mountains. And I wanted to see that ending again, which had been met with baffled, appreciative laughs the first night but landed quite solemnly on second viewing. At one point Bigui asks, “Is this what the end of the world feels like?” In Sirat, it comes with both a bang and a whimper.

Sirat premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

The post Cannes Review: Oliver Laxe’s Desert Trance Sirat Is a Grand, Adventurous Achievement first appeared on The Film Stage.