Sirat — Die Before You Die

Oliver Laxe names his film for the bridge over hell, then makes you walk it without a railing.

The first thing you see in Sirat is work. Hands stacking speaker cabinets into a black wall at the foot of a Moroccan canyon. Cables taped down. Generators fueled. Levels set. Then a bass note rolls out across the rock like weather, and you understand why Oliver Laxe spent his opening minutes on labor: he is filming the building of the rave before he films the rave, because this is a ceremony, and ceremonies do not appear. They get built, board by board, by people who know what they are for.

The title tells you the rest, if you let it. In Islamic tradition the sirat is the bridge that spans hell, thinner than a hair and sharper than a sword. The saved walk across. Everyone else finds out. Laxe took the Jury Prize at Cannes with a film named for that bridge, and the film behaves exactly like its name. There is a far side. There is a drop. There is nothing to hold.

Luis, played by Sergi Lopez, has come to this party with his young son Esteban and a photograph of his daughter Mar, who vanished months ago and was last seen at a rave like this one. Stop and feel the loneliness of that errand. Every other person in this canyon came to the desert to disappear, on purpose, as a way of life. Luis came to undo a disappearance. He is a man handing a photograph into a crowd whose single shared value is that nobody here gets looked for, and that asymmetry powers the whole picture. When a small convoy of ravers pushes deeper south toward a rumored last party, Luis and the boy follow in their tired van, because a rumor of Mar is the only currency he has left.

Then the world beyond the frame gives way. A radio bulletin. Soldiers at a fuel stop. A map that stopped meaning what it meant that morning. A war has started somewhere, unnamed and unexplained, and the convoy can no longer go back the way it came. Laxe never cuts away to show the catastrophe. He keeps the camera on the trucks and lets the news land on us the way it lands on the characters: by inference, by the changed posture of people who have heard enough. And somewhere past the halfway mark the film does something to its passengers that I am not going to describe, and then it does it again. Trust me with the shape and nothing more. The ruptures are staged smaller than any studio would dare, and they hit harder than anything a studio put out this year. The film you bought a ticket for is not the film that walks you out.

The bloodline here runs straight back to Sorcerer. Friedkin’s 1977 convoy of nitroglycerin trucks is still the measure of dread about vehicles crossing ground that wants them dead, and Sirat is its truest descendant in decades. The trucks are the only thing keeping anyone alive, so their failures get photographed with the care lesser films save for gunfights. Mauro Herce shoots on Super 16mm, and the grain earns its keep: the air reads as particulate, hostile, something you would have to chew. The desert collected its fee for that texture. A sandstorm during the Morocco shoot destroyed most of the production’s lenses and forced extensive reshoots, and the film wears the ordeal openly. Nothing on this screen looks negotiated with. Sunlight here is not illumination. It is exposure, in the radiological sense.

Lopez has spent thirty years as European cinema’s most amiable menace, and Laxe strips all of it away. The charm that curdled in With a Friend Like Harry, the charm that wore a captain’s uniform in Pan’s Labyrinth, is nowhere in Luis. What remains is a heavy, patient man who holds out a photograph the way a worker holds out a permit: at arm’s length, already braced for the head-shake, filing each no with the other noes. Around him Laxe cast almost nobody professional. The ravers were street-cast by Nadia Acimi out of the actual free-party world, and their competence pays for the whole gamble. These people can rig a sound system, splint a truck, read a horizon. So when the second half asks them to spend those skills on staying alive, the film gets to play survival as procedure instead of melodrama. Procedure is scarier. Bruno Nunez Arjona plays Esteban on the one honest note available to a child in a picture like this: not brave, not wise, just tired and cold and hoping his father notices.

Kangding Ray’s score took a year and a half to build, and Laxe has described the method as dematerialization: the techno decays as the story does, kick drums thinning into sine waves, sine waves into wind. That sounds like press-kit poetry until you sit there and hear it happen. The bass in the opening reels lives in your sternum like a second pulse, and every loss the film takes afterward is a frequency you stop hearing. Laia Casanova’s sound design finishes the job, packing the desert so tight around the audience that silence stops being an absence and becomes a room you are locked inside. There is no neutral setting anywhere in this mix. Sound is either the party or the toll.

The serious case against Sirat calls it chic nihilism. A film that baits you with a father’s grief, spends the daughter as a premise rather than a person, then trades the search for a catastrophe it never has to explain, so its cruelty can feel cosmic instead of authored. Argued honestly, part of that charge sticks. Mar stays a photograph. The war stays a rumor. If you wanted this film to owe its own setup an answer, you are not wrong to feel stiffed, and that unpaid debt is the true mark against it. But the nihilism half of the accusation dies on contact with what Laxe actually made and what he has said about it. He calls the film a ceremony, Sufi to its bones, and told an interviewer he wanted to make a film where people could die before they die, which is the oldest instruction in mystical practice, here dressed as a road movie. A nihilist shrug does not spend eighteen months dissolving its own score by degrees. Punishment engineered this precisely, aimed this squarely at transformation, is a rite. Rites are supposed to cost.

What stays with you afterward is not an image but a load. Bass in the chest. Grit in the teeth. The specific weight of a boy leaning against his father in the cold. Sirat will split every room it plays to, and the split is correct: a bridge over hell is not a crowd-pleaser, it is a crossing, and some people will reasonably decline to make it. Go in warned and go in rested. I cannot tell you it is a pleasure. I can tell you I walked out changed in the direction the film intended, and that is the rarest thing I can report about any movie this year. The desert wins. Laxe meant it to. Crossing is the point.