Sirāt shows us a world without a safety net. It resonates because it is a world that we suspect is becoming our reality, and perhaps was never far away in the first place. It resonates with our deepest fears and denies us the catharsis we are accustomed to. It hits close to home, to say the least.
Things start out simply enough, with a tight-knit group of five friends dancing at a rave in the desert. Soon Luis (Sergi López) and Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) show up, looking for Luis’s daughter, who has been missing for some time. When the rave is broken up by soldiers, Luis and Esteban follow the group of friends across the desert to another rave, hoping to find the missing woman.
Sirāt knows exactly the type of movie it wants to be. The desert setting is used to great effect, with tremendous locations and a gritty harshness that matches the movie’s tone. It has a deep understanding of rave and EDM subculture as well. The group is shown to be accepting and helpful to Luis and Esteban, even though they are strangers and true outsiders to the subculture. The tensions and arguments that the group endures on the road arise naturally from their differences and misunderstandings.
The heavy emphasis on tone early in the film lays the groundwork for its various turns of events, making them shocking in the moment but a natural progression in retrospect. The movie is horrific but not quite a horror movie; action-packed but not quite an action movie. It uses all the tools of cinema, going to great lengths to get a visceral reaction, and creating something uniquely upsetting. Their ostensible destination becomes unimportant – no rescue or resolution will be offered. They continue the journey only to stay in motion, because to stop is to die.
The upsetting nature of Sirāt will put off some of its audience, no doubt. But there is a grander design at play. We learn that war has broken out – perhaps World War III. We see a mad scramble for resources at a crowded gasoline station. The unrest and tragedy our characters experience aren’t directly related to this, per se, but the parallels between universal and personal unrest are clear.
The world is harsh, and the structures we have built to shield ourselves from it are falling apart. Even these characters, who are generally self-sufficient and on the fringes of society to begin with, are affected. These characters also have tremendous privilege, as white Spanish speakers in a formerly colonized country. They show little interest in or knowledge about the history of the region or the tension between the local countries and people groups. But even the privileged cannot escape the apocalyptic state of the world.
These sorts of nonspecific evocations of larger contexts could be seen as a refusal to truly grapple with them. But it is best to take films on their own terms, and Sirāt is a lot more interested in showing us where we’re going than where we’ve been. It is playing in the realm of the allegorical and universal.
A movie that wants to make its viewers feel awful should generally have a pretty good reason why. Provocation can be an element that accomplishes something interesting, but should not be an end unto itself. But Sirāt’s provocations never feel empty, even if they are a bit opaque. Its focus is on mood over exposition, but it is the mood of the moment, and those who are living it may be resistant because it tells them truths that are hard to hear.
