150 Word Review: 'Sirât' (2025)
Unjust deserts
Very few modern movies reveal what it feels like to be alive at this moment in history. Sitting through director Oliver Laxe’s Spanish-language Sirât, I was restless and unsettled. I didn’t know what to expect; the movie is hypnotic and filthy, and there’s a scene of unimaginable heartbreak that almost made me want to get up and leave. Sirât is a chimeric masterpiece of doom—a mystery, a political thriller, and a post-apocalyptic road trip. The music throbs, claws, consumes.
The title word is Arabic for “path” or “way,” and in Islam, it refers to a narrow bridge over hell. Sergi López stars as a father searching for his daughter, with the help of his son. She went missing during a rave in the Moroccan desert; these two are strangers in a strange land. They fall in with a motley crew of party monsters and caravan over wastelands to find her.