25 February 2026

Sirāt makes raving sacred

But be warned: the film is savage and uncomfortable

The philosopher Roger Scruton would have been rather out of place at a rave. He favoured the formality of the minuet, not “the disorderly solipsism of the jive”, as he disdainfully called it. “What passes for dancing is in fact a lonely parody of the sexual act, a formless vibrating of the body accompanied by vacant expressions and wild movements of the hands and arms. The participants do not touch but stand isolated in the solitude of their feelings, jerked by the music like puppets on a string,” he sniffed.

Óliver Laxe, however, the 43-year-old Galician-French director of Sirāt, believes profoundly in the spiritual value of rave parties. Ravers, he says, are doing nothing less than praying with their bodies, “something we’ve been doing for thousands and thousands of years”. They are seeking ecstasy, rapture, the moment of transcendence. He has practised what he preaches too, in the Free Party movement, spending years in the Moroccan desert.

Sirāt (an Arabic term, meaning “path” or “way”, referring to the bridge in Islamic eschatology that spans hell and leads to paradise) opens with an extended rave in the desert, filmed almost anthropologically. These ravers are real – grubby and scarred, not young and far from beautiful – losing themselves absolutely in the pounding music by Kangding Ray, the Berlin-based French musician David Letellier. Among them wanders one tired, older man, Luis (the excellent Sergi López, the only professional actor in the film), with his small son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), handing out flyers. They’re looking for Luis’s teenage daughter Mar, who has been missing for five months after joining the rave scene. So here there seems to be a familiar dad-daughter quest narrative being set up here, a bit like The Searchers, if not Taken, with some resolution by the end. It turns out to be nothing of the kind.

Nobody has seen Mar but some travellers, resting on the hillside, are sympathetic and suggest she might be headed for the next semi-secret rave, much further south. They’re an extraordinary group of people, physically wounded and marked – one has lost an arm, another a leg – but impressively composed, all played by real-life Free Dance veterans. They bring an immediate sense of integrity.

The army arrives and shuts down the rave, ordering them all to evacuate for their own safety as war looms. Our little clan of ravers strike off from the main column of vehicles, heading to that next destination in their heavy trucks. Luis, in his ordinary car, with his small son and their little dog, impulsively decides to follow, uninvited. “You don’t understand what you’re getting into,” they warn him. “This is the desert…”

What ensues – not to be spoiled – is a road film like no other, even if it does occasionally bring to mind Mad Max or the terrifying, nitroglycerine-laden journey in Clouzot’s 1953 classic The Wages of Fear. That perilous path ends up fully and brutally actualised in a series of terrifying scenes. As a piece of filmmaking devoted to honouring the immensity of this landscape through remarkable images combined with a fantastic soundtrack – in which electronic dance music melds with the sounds of the desert – it’s overwhelming, becoming abstract and metaphysical by the end. It surely should take Best Sound at the Oscars, and demands to be experienced on a big screen and through the best audio system possible. At Cannes last year it caused a sensation, and many good critics chose it as among their films of the year.

But be warned: Sirāt is savage and takes you places you do not want to go. Laxe, who is influenced by Sufism and Gestalt therapy as well as rave culture (and looks a bit like Christ, or at least the image depicted in the Turin Shroud), has made a series of extreme statements about the film and its purpose. “We live in a deeply thanatophobic society – one that has expelled death from its very core,” he contends. His film is intended as nothing less than shock therapy for such malaise. “This film – narratively, philosophically and aesthetically – kills you. You die watching Sirāt, and you are reborn, in a way,” he promises, not quite the usual director’s come-on. “We have to die before dying,” he maintains, for “death allows you to speak more clearly about life”. Now that’s something Roger Scruton might well endorse.