Joseph Moser
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and no one feels fine. That’s the situation throughout most of “Sirāt,” the stunning Spanish and French coproduction from director Oliver Laxe that was a nominee for Best International Feature Film and Best Sound at the Oscars last month.
This movie offers an immersive visceral experience, carrying viewers across punishing deserts, into the midst of thumping raves, and up and down foreboding mountainsides. With its compelling but unconventional approach to characterization, haunting performances by a cast of mostly nonactors, and brilliant sound design, “Sirāt” slowly got under my skin and then completely absorbed and unnerved me. The film plays at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier through Thursday, April 2.
Unfolding in harsh Moroccan deserts, “Sirāt” focuses on wandering outsiders in an unraveling world. As the Spaniard Luis searches for Mar, his raver daughter who has gone incommunicado for months, he is accompanied by his preteen son, Esteban. They attend an outdoor rave (a colossal dance party) hoping to find Mar, and when a military unit commands the ravers to evacuate, Luis and Esteban follow a group that breaks away from the convoy leaving the event. The father and son slowly become integrated into this band of raver-slacker-adventurers that includes Jade, Steff, Tonin, Bigui, and Josh (all nonactors called by their real names). As this group of seven proceeds through a succession of treacherous landscapes, radio reports tell of explosions, attacks on airports, and countries frantically choosing sides in a new world war. With no certain destination, their journey devolves into a harrowing struggle for survival.
While employing science-fiction and thriller elements and evoking both the “Mad Max” series and the French classic “The Wages of Fear,” “Sirāt” nonetheless succeeds in being remarkably original and character-driven.
The seven principal figures are almost completely defined by what they say and do onscreen, as the film foregoes clumsy backstory, which a lesser work might have used to target viewers’ sympathy. Instead, this movie allows us to assess its resourceful, grungy, colorful, aimless characters without any cloying sentimentality. At the same time, the film does nothing to glamorize or eroticize rave culture, so Jade, Steff, Tonin, Bigui, and Josh come across as distinct, complex personalities. Furthermore, Luis, the anguished and often ineffectual father (played by veteran Spanish actor Sergi López), has an astonishing character arc.
Visually and sonically, “Sirāt” builds to a startling intensity, as the seven beleaguered central figures encounter unimaginable loss. In addition to the sublime imagery crafted by director Laxe and cinematographer Mauro Herce, score composer Kangding Ray and sound designer Laia Casanovas deserve tremendous credit for casting an unrelenting auditory spell. Several scenes are so suspenseful that you may want to look away, but while some viewers might be turned off by this tension, it compelled me to ponder how trauma can both warp people and fleetingly endow them with a sense of purpose.
The film’s title is an Arabic word that can mean “path” or, more specifically, as the opening titles point out, the narrow bridge that “connects paradise and hell.” Unmoored and alienated from this unforgiving land, the characters seek a path out of desolation, and although their search isn’t entirely hopeless, they find no definitive solutions or answers.
The final images of the film, which are prefigured in a dream, suggest the wanderers may have achieved some sense of connection and integration in a shared condition of displacement, though this consolation arrives only after enormous suffering. It is left to viewers to determine whether the characters have gathered any wisdom or strength from all that they’ve endured. In this way, the ending leaves us with much to contemplate and revisit.
A heady, gut-wrenching work of cinema, “Sirāt” portrays social (and, indirectly, political) chaos that barely seems futuristic given the events of the past year. Although the film plunges viewers into a hellscape, it does not revel in gore or cruelty. It finds the human in the extreme, reminding us that if civilizations collapse, we’ll all be strangers and migrants — if we’re not already.
“Sirāt” plays at the Savoy Theater through Thursday, April 2.
