What does Sirāt’s desert really stand for?

Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and currently in the race for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, Sirāt is the fourth feature by Franco-Galician director Oliver Laxe.

The film opens under the sign of collective ritual. The rave is constructed as a ceremony: a concentrative apparatus in which bodies recognise each other through sound, rhythm, and physical proximity. Characters occupy the same space without necessarily sharing a direction, as if community existed only for the duration of the beat. It is within this fragile equilibrium that the film’s first detour occurs: the arrival of the army. Importantly, it does not come to dismantle an illegal gathering, but to announce an imminent war. The threat remains suspended—never fully disclosed—and it is precisely this opacity that generates the first perceptual displacement shared by the viewer.

From this point onward, the desert imposes itself as an absolute condition. A stripped space without anchors, it becomes a stress test for both bodies and vision: distances distort, orientation dissolves, every choice turns consequential. Each pause and restart exposes the characters to a structural impossibility of control. Within this emptiness, techno assumes a decisive function. It neither comments nor decorates; it operates. It acts on space as a material force, compressing it, making it temporarily inhabitable. Later, the speakers remain scattered across the landscape like Kubrickian monoliths—mute relics once sound, cohesion, and certainty are extinguished. Traces of a community that was first tangible and then—quite literally—detonated.

As the journey progresses, movement loses its orienting value. In this sense, Sirāt implicitly recalls Friedkin’s The Wages of Fear (1977): not through spectacle, but through the logic of endurance, of a traversal in which each advance corresponds to a new threshold of risk.
What is tested is not bravery but stamina—the ability to remain inside a condition that may collapse at any moment.

The inevitable comparison with Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), however, works through subtraction. Where Miller organises the desert as a readable system of trajectories and antagonists, Laxe keeps the terrain open, opaque, stripped of identifiable enemies.
Tragedy does not appear as the outcome of conflict, but as the abrupt eruption of the unpredictable. Crucially, Laxe aligns this shift with the viewer’s own experience: like the protagonists, we are exposed to the same sudden rupture between calm and disaster.

The film reaches its most ruthless form when catastrophe becomes the only remaining horizon. The violence that erupts is not only extreme, but spectatorial unacceptable: it cannot be absorbed into recognisable narrative logic. It tears bodies apart—and with them the viewer’s expectations. What remains is pure contingency. Sirāt does not attempt to domesticate it; rather, it exposes itself—and the spectator—to a world in which nothing guarantees continuity, not even the next step.

A further interpretive layer lies in Laxe’s portrait of post-imperial Europe as a social body. A European middle class (embodied by the character Luis) appears in free fall, cut off from any real capacity to act upon the forces shaping it. War, though always kept off-screen—invoked as background noise, as distant radio transmissions—permeates the image as a hyperobject: diffuse, intangible, and yet sufficient to contaminate every breath between one frame and the next.

The reference to the “sirāt”—the razor-thin bridge in Islamic tradition separating salvation from damnation—functions both as perceptual structure and symbolic architecture. This makes Laxe’s choice legible: the title appears only thirty minutes into the film, when the group leaves the road and enters the desert. Read blasphemously, the passage across the metaphorical sirāt and the final minefield recalls the third trial in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), where an invisible bridge must be crossed with eyes closed, on faith. But Laxe’s ending offers no salvation.

Leaving the cinema, what lingers in the viewer is not only the echo of rhythm, dancing, or a latent pull toward the mystical. It is something more primal: the realisation that even the simplest gesture—moving forward through space—cannot be taken for granted. The film’s force lies precisely in leaving us suspended, exposed, compelled to inhabit the absence of a future as a condition of the present.

All images: Courtesy Mubi