In Sirāt, Óliver Laxe’s opening image of massive speakers being assembled for a rave in the Moroccan desert establishes the film as an immersive audio-visual journey. Shot by cinematographer Mauro Herce on 16mm celluloid (Arri Arriflex 416, Zeiss Ultra Primes), the format’s rough analogue grain helps capture the sun-pummeled landscape under a harsh light.

The result is a hypnotic, tactile image of the desert—sacred and menacing—through which a trance, pulsing with psychedelic techno, can grow. The evocative formalism of the imagery and otherworldly soundscape created by Kangding Ray give the dunes a passive, sentinel character and frame the film’s story in epic terms from the start.

The film’s signature tableau is a ring of barefoot, gutter punk ravers dancing around speakers that loom like futuristic menhirs on the side of blazing hills. The camera often lingers on their party and weather worn faces, impassive under scars, clad with makeshift clothing, casualties of a war zone mentioned only in passing. The gritty verité texture of the casting extends to the vehicles, tents and rigs: the makeshift convoy of an old bus and army truck is shot in expansive wide-shots, the machinery appearing like sacrificial altars on the shifting sands.

At the heart of the film is Luis (Sergi López), a middle-aged father with kind eyes, and his young son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona). The pair enter this underground world only by desperation: to find their daughter and sister who has disappeared into the rave scene. What results is a road movie haunted by ambiguity, evoking the claustrophobia and dread of Wages of Fear (1953), treating traditional narrative beats as musical drops. The cruelly arbitrary midpoint and anti-climactic ending are hinted at by one of the ravers when describing the sound from a speaker: “it’s not for listening, it’s for dancing.”

The Sirāt allegorical tale plays like a ‘vibe’; fragmentary, intense and open to interpretation.

The film’s soundscape is its beating heart. Ray’s score starts as a savage, tribal techno that transitions into strange, alien noises that batter the cinema’s speakers. The soundtrack frays as the story twists and darkens, adding synth ghosts and subsiding rhythms that mirror a father’s fading hope.

Sirāt offers no simple catharsis or moral lesson, but the title does provide a clue as to the extended metaphor of the film: the Sirāt bridge—that hair thin path between heaven and hell in Islamic tradition—which represents the precarious nature of modern life. In this biblical metaphor, the Lynchian egress of the arid, mountain road represents this hair thin path, while a minefield awaits to awaken the audience to the chaos around them, the privilege of naivety, and a reminder that we’re dancing at the end of the world.