Sirat Movie Review (Cannes 2025): The Most Powerful Film of This Cannes Film Festival
Sirat Movie by Oliver Laxe is the perfect storm of this Cannes 2025, it is something that not only you do not expect, but above all, you cannot predict, you cannot understand that it is coming, you cannot simply. Political film, a very philosophical film too, but with our feet firmly planted on the ground, with the ability to be disturbing, very human, to bring us into the life and interactions of a company, among the strangest views on the big screen lately. Previewed at Cannes Film Festival 2025, Sirât marks the return of Óliver Laxe, a director known for his visionary and spiritual poetics (Mimosas, Viendra le feu). Co-produced by the Almodóvar brothers, the film is located halfway between existential road movie and mystical allegory, telling the story of a father and son in search of his daughter who disappeared among the desert lands of southern Morocco. Despite aesthetic and symbolic ambitions, Sirât struggles to transmit a coherent message, sometimes drowning in his conceptual density and losing emotional adherence with the viewer.
Sirat Movie Review (Cannes 2025): The Story Plot
For Luis (Sergi Lopez), Morocco is the last resort, literally. Together with his son Esteban, he is looking for his eldest daughter Mar, whom he has not heard from for months and who was last spotted at a rave. For this reason, it is now there, between dust, heat, and a very strange humanity that moves to the syncopated rhythm of electronic music that does not understand, love, or endure. But when the military interrupts the concert and orders everyone to leave, Luis decides to run away and with his minivan he drives inwards, following the track traced by the two campers in which Jade, Bigui, Josh, Stef, and Tonin move. They are pariahs, a sort of Brancaleone army that moves from rave to rave, without a real predetermined path, without a real basic idea, without even a real will if not to be on one’s own, linked by a spirit of absolute commonality. Between passes, streams, mountain paths, deserts, without often knowing what will be beyond the next hairpin bend, that small group will begin to get to know each other better, to become a family, at least until the tragedy and the case come dramatically to collect.
Sirat is a film with many faces, unpredictable as its director, for some time one of the most prominent names on the Iberian scene. Conceived as an almost semi-documentary story, where the camera is always discreet, intimate, but never surpasses the gaze of the protagonists, the vision of their world. Mauro Herce’s photography has the great merit of making the beauties of Morocco, of an indefinite Spain, palpable, enhancing every acrid color, every gust of wind, every moment in which it is not known where you are, you only know with whom. Then comes, sudden and ruthless, the blow. A tremendous blow, as a professional killer, that Laxe has planned, structured, and put at the right time, in the right place, to make everything turn towards drama, the existential journey into the darkest part of one’s soul. But Sirat also becomes a political fresco, in the most indefinite sense, but not for this reason, without power that can be imagined. There is nothing around, we are alone with our nightmares, with the disasters of the past that come to claim their tribute. In short, we go to the survival, the dramatic post-apocalyptic, the immersion within the last and desperate world created by the West.
Sirat Movie Review (Cannes 2025) and Analysis
Oliver Laxe has the great ability to decide that this story, these wayfarers, must be portrayed for what they are, that cinema is truth. Sergi Lopez, one of the most particular actors of his generation, is perfect in painting this man determined to find a daughter, so much so also puts the health of his son at risk, bringing him to that slice of the world without a real law, a real meaning. The rest of the cast, however, is made up of non-professional actors. Someone is missing, others a leg, we are not from the parts of Claudio Caligari, a much more phenomenological filmmaker, but certainly Laxe knows what he wants, he knows how to get it, he knows that what matters is the truth or even just a shred of it. Road Movie was said, and Sirat is, in the most exemplary sense, it seems to have the dust, sweat, the heat of a land where civilization has not arrived, but on the other hand, we arrive. That group effectively refused the so-called civilization, but it is not even so one with that land of which they are unwanted visitors in reality. In the end, the general impression is that of a terrible illusion, to deceive itself about one’s identity, in the place where it occurs.
Sirat is magnificent, hypnotizing, as it can make us understand the terrible illusion of that group, symbol of the eternal seeking something different, absolute freedom, happiness that is also generated by others. Some sequences are heartbreaking, beyond normal endurance, then there is the surprise effect, there is the danger that arrives and is monstrous, it is the legacy of the West and its wrongdoings in that corner of the world to which it has removed everything. The desert has no answers, it is an empty box that welcomes despair. Nature is cruel, but only for us, which we persist in wanting to test. After almost two hours of Odyssey between crevasses, Stradoni, the feeling of the improbable leaves room for the certainty that perhaps something like this happened, maybe not so, not there, but something similar will certainly have happened. It is difficult to understand if and how much Sirat can aspire to win something, this Cannes 2025 appears unstable, unpredictable, the competition has given for now interesting titles and some illusion, but it will be difficult to find something that draws Laxe’s ability to make us feel unprepared, without a minimum of defenses in front of a screen.
Sirât presents itself as a work imbued with spiritual symbolism, which aims to tell not only the loss of a daughter, but also the inner bewilderment of an entire humanity in front of its void. The idea of the “bridge”, the Islamic Sirāt suspended between damnation and salvation, is a metaphor for existence, of the fragile balance between awareness and abyss. However, this thematic tension is developed in a dispersive way: what at the beginning seems an existential reflection is diluted in repeated images, hallucinated visions, and symbols that remain more evoked than articulated. Laxe seems to want to tell the sense of bewilderment of existence symbolically and spiritually, but ends up making the message so vague and nuanced that it is difficult to understand, favoring aesthetics and atmosphere at the expense of narrative clarity. The result is that, instead of leading the viewer into a progressive awareness, the film leaves him at the mercy of suggestions that never find full resonance or narrative or emotional fulfillment.
From a visual point of view, we have a direction made of long shots, symmetrical compositions, and a masterful use of the landscape as a mirror of the soul. The desert is not a background, but an actor, an emotional environment, a prison. However, in Sirât, this formal rigor gradually turns into a self-referential device: sand on the one hand, the camera builds powerful atmospheres, on the other, the film seems more interested in contemplating its beauty than in communicating a sense. The pace is deliberately slow, but in several places it risks immobility. Visual metaphors multiply, but without a clear direction, and the narrative dissolution, which could be a poetic act, at certain times becomes a directorial void, as if the film were spinning on itself without finding a landing place.
One of the strongest elements of the film is its soundtrack: a continuous pulsation of techno, trance, environmental noises, and distorted sounds, which more than accompanying the images, guides them, pierces them, invades them. In some moments, this choice is perfectly consistent with the intent of the film: techno becomes a tribal ritual, a mystical vibration that drags the characters into a state of existential trance and that makes the viewer live an immersive experience. However, this same repeated, obsessive, almost totalizing sound sometimes ends up saturating perception. Instead of revealing, obscure; instead of conducting, it confuses. Laxe seems to want to let us into a sound mantra that transcends time, but the effect risks anesthetizing rather than transforming.
The atmospheric drama that marries the family drama of the research of a missing young woman? Laxe enjoys mixing the cards, and so the viewer has to get used to the idea that every canon hypothesis is destined to dissolve in a cloud, fading on the horizon. To pursue the possibility (little more than a desire) that Mar may find himself at another rave, even more lost in the middle of nowhere, in that immense desert where the border between Morocco and Mauritania passes, Luis and Esteban abandon the column of vehicles coordinated by the Moroccan army – which cleared the rave, turning off the music and ordering anyone to go back to where – had come from and embark on the crazy adventure, joining two much better equipped trucks in facing a hostile territory, with killer hairpin bends, wads in which to risk getting bogged down and whoever has more. Their companions are Jade, Tonin, Begui, Stef, Josh, Raverhard, and Pure, who carry on their bodies the traces of a life lived far beyond the edge, in the middle of the cliff: Tonin has lost a leg, Begui the right hand, and Stef lacks some teeth.
Residues of the past, resistant to a desired disorder, sought against the practice of existing. They are in all respects deserters, like the protagonists of Boris Vian’s beautiful song that Tonin improvises to amuse others (“And tell his/if they come looking for me/that they can shoot me/I have no weapons”). Mar’s thought soon came out of the spectator’s synapses, and perhaps even of the characters, if it is true that the only comment on the girl comes from Jade’s mouth, that sifting through the photos on Luis’s cell phone claims to see a sad face in her. You just have to go on, in a desert that gives no respite, eternal looming threat of a nature that does not forgive European easiness, the idea of impossible control, and perhaps therefore also of a supposed superiority, though never expressed in words. And here in the folds of a stunning vision, capable of unhinging any spectatorial defense, the Henri-Georges Clouzot of Lives sold even there the trucks, even there the harsh nature, even there an anarchist humanity that would only like to stay out of all conflicts. But it can’t.
Sirat Movie Review (Cannes 2025): The Last Words
Sirāt is a powerful visual and sound experience, capable of suggesting and immersing the viewer in a hypnotic flow between blinding deserts, ritual techno, and mystical symbolisms. However, the choice to privilege extreme allegory and narrative suspension leaves in the shade what the emotional heart of the story should be: the desperate search for a daughter. The result is a fascinating but unbalanced film, where formal ambition obscures the clarity of the speech. At times evocative, but too hermetic to strike deeply.
Cast: Sergi López, Bruno Núñez, Jade Oukid
Directed By: Óliver Laxe
Where We Watched: At the Cannes Film Festival 2025
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars)
Sirat Movie Review (Cannes 2025): The Most Powerful Film of This Cannes Film Festival | Filmyhype
Director: Óliver Laxe
Date Created: 2025-05-21 19:24
4
Pros
- Immersive and magnetic visual impact
- Original and totalizing use of techno music
Cons
- Narration sacrificed to mystical allegory
- Loss of the message you want to convey
- Sense of poorly defined spiritual journey
