Slave... to the rhythm
dir: Oliver Laxe
2025
What…
Huh? Sirāt is, well, you can’t accuse it of being the same old same old as usual.
The name in Arabic means way or path, but it’s commonly, at least religiously, a reference to the path to Paradise, which is a very difficult place to get to, apparently. Fall either side of the path, as in, fall short along the path and you’ll either be cut to shreds or burned to ashes.
This film is about… I have no idea what it’s about, to be honest. Maybe it’s how great electronic dance music is, or how great it is to dance to rave music, how great it truly can be to feel like part of a collective, and like you’re not alone, if only for a time.
Beyond that, I dunno. Your guess, if you haven’t seen it, is as good as mine. If you have, well, you have my condolences.
We watch as some roadies stack up some speakers, in a desert. Towers of speakers. Against an ancient backdrop of cliffs, mesas, the old bones of the earth and the defiant sky, mocking us.
Then there’s music, and entranced people dancing, dancing, dancing. These people, if you have an eye for it, are not extras selected to fill in the background of a rave / nightclub scene, like what we’ve seen in countless movies. These people are… you can tell they are living a lifestyle, a certain lifestyle. They are the chemically affected worshippers of a techno god, and I don’t mean the DJ. Their worship is their dancing, like Sufi dervishes, like mystics themselves, in furious motion with elegant purpose.
And intruding into that world comes someone who clearly doesn’t belong there, handing out fliers and asking one question: Have you seen this girl?
The question is asked in an array of languages, but the person asking is clearly Spanish, even if all this dancing mania is happening somewhere that is either Morocco or meant to be Morocco, where raves go for days and apparently, for these people, only lead to more raves afterwards.
Luis, the man asking the question, who I said is obviously Spanish, I said because I recognised the actor, being Sergi Lopez, who might not be a household name but he’s well known to people who watch sub-titled movies. He played the evil Captain / Generalissimo Franco stand-in in Pan’s Labyrinth all those years ago. Now, well, these days he looks more like me.
He’s a fine actor, I guess. Along with him is also an actor, playing his young son Esteban (Bruno Nunez Arjona). I single them out as actors because there are a whole bunch of other people in the flick, and I’m pretty sure they’re not actors.
Jade Oukid plays Jade, Joshua Liam Henderson plays Josh, Tonin Janvier plays Tonin, Stefania Gadda plays Stef; I think you get the idea.
Don’t get me wrong; I often found them fascinating in different ways and for different reasons, but we learn almost nothing about them. This is not a film with backstories and character development.
They are people selected to be in the flick because they embody a particular look and lifestyle, perhaps the perpetual raving lifestyle, perhaps the traveller lifestyle. Either way, I got the feeling none of them were given a script to read. They were maybe told “well, just say what you would say if this was happening?”
This is a film that feels like there wasn’t a script. I mean clearly there was a screenplay, and some kind of plan, but it really feels like chaos with cameras on. No part of this flick is predictable. There’s lots of techno, sorry, electronic dance music, or whatever the kids are calling that music these days, lots of dancing, and lots of driving of trucks through a desert.
They say a journey is not about the destination, it’s about the friends you make along the way. Well, this flick is saying something like (if it’s saying anything at all) forget about the destination, there is no destination, the journey is all there is.
Forget about the fireworks factory; we’re never going to get to it.
You can make the argument, after watching the flick, and considering the name, that there is a metaphysical, existential element to the movie, or maybe it should be looked at through the lens of spirituality. Anyone who’s spent any time with people who go to a lot of raves or use a lot of psychedelics (I know, those circles only entirely overlap) will tell you that they seek and sometimes enjoy a feeling of transcendence, of having slipped the surly bonds of our physical bodies and unquiet minds, achieving a state of ego death or higher consciousness otherwise not possible.
But you could also say that about a film with those animated yellow Minions in it.
You can, if you’re French, say it about virtually anything. This flick wants to have all the cakes and to eat them too, and then completely forgets all about the cakes, and makes you think “is this flick just a killer soundtrack with whatever visuals to go along with it, masquerading as a movie?”
Something happens halfway through the flick. Up until this point, it’s mostly been just a flick where an ill-equipped dad and his young son tag along with some travellers through inhospitable terrain with the intention of getting to another rave where the dad’s daughter might be. There’s not a heap of drama, or disagreement, or tension, or suspense. At first the only question we have is whether the travellers, who are in more suitable vehicles, and who have more experience in this area, will convince the dad to retreat, or whether they’ll abandon them in order to force them back to civilisation.
That’s answered earlier on, in that the travellers are decent people, and have a code of morality about these kinds of situations. You get lulled into thinking it’s a road movie, people travel together, face some hardships together, get to know each other, become better people etc etc.
Yeah, nah.
The more they travel, the more isolated from anyone else they become, and the more they hear (through radio broadcasts) that the world itself is falling apart; that there might not be a world to return to, if even there is a chance to.
And then the completely terrible thing happens, and you’re forgiven for wondering “how can the rest of the movie happen now? Isn’t this too massive a thing to have happened to just continue?”
And fucking hell does it keep going. From that initial tragedy, what happens next, I’m sorry to spoil, becomes so terrible that it almost becomes a comedy. Like so surreally strangely monstrous in what happens to the poor characters that you wonder if the director is maybe taking the piss?
Maybe it is about travellers on the path to paradise, shedding their corporeal bodies, except not metaphorically, or maybe it’s a comedy sketch without a laugh track to tell you when to find it funny.
It is shocking, though. I would argue at least that it may be gratuitous, but it’s not gory, which is some consolation, maybe?
It’s been almost twenty four hours since I’ve watched it, and I still don’t know entirely how I feel about most of it. I generally find flicks that are calculated to be ‘provocations’ pretentious and unimpressive, but I don’t think it was (at least I hope it wasn’t) calculated to be as such. I feel like the director had a warmth for these characters that wasn’t about doing to them what directors of horror films sometimes do with glee, but he still needed to do what he does in order to make some exclamatory point.
There has to have been a reason for it, but I’m going to let potential viewers see it for themselves and make up their minds. Those last scenes are somewhat mind-boggling, ending on a stunning image, a strange image, of humanity, a river of souls, almost, continuing on an eternal journey, that’s kind of bracing, and kind of irritating at the same time.
If you can’t stand trance music or whatever version of this kind of music that you care to call it, helpfully provided by electronica artist Kangding Ray, this will not be your bag, because it suffuses every scene and dominates everything so comprehensively that it’s almost more important than the awe-inspiring cinematography, of which there is copious amounts.
I only ever heard about this flick because it was somehow nominated for Best International Film at this year’s Academy Awards, and I have to say, it proves to me that the vast majority of Academy members vote for stuff without watching it. There’s no way, no freaking way, that 10,000 plus members of the Academy, whose average age is probably somewhere in the 80s, sat through two hours of this flick, and thought “I get where this is coming from!” and ticked the relevant box in time for it to count. No way.
For the rest of us, well, now you can stream it in the privacy of your own home and drop acid at your leisure as well, so that’s probably the perfect way to enjoy this perplexing film.
8 times are you human, or are you dancer out of 10
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“Does this feel like the end of the world to you?”
- “I don’t know. The world’s been ending for a long time now.” - Sirāt
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