Time: 114 Minutes
Cast:
Sergi López as Luis
Bruno Núñez Arjona as Esteban
Richard Bellamy as Bigui
Stefania Gadda as Stef
Joshua Liam Henderson as Josh
Tonin Janvier as Tonin
Jade Oukid as Jade
Director: Óliver Laxe

I was curious about Sirāt. I first heard about it receiving some awards consideration, but also noticed a lot of backlash against it. So I finally saw it for myself knowing very little beforehand, and I found it to be a very mixed experience.

The first half begins simply as it focuses on a father looking for his daughter with his son, and they join a group of ravers on a trip to a rave, hoping to find her there. It starts off as a meditative journey as it just follows them and I wasn’t emotionally invested and the characters weren’t interesting to me. However, the overall vibe, mostly due to the visuals, the sound and the steady pacing, did make for a fairly mesmerizing viewing experience, and so I was willing to follow. Then things really changed in the second half. A particular ‘shocking’ thing happens for contrived reasons, there’s a stark tonal shift and things start going downhill quickly. This event changes the path of the movie and it’s like the rest of the movie is trying to adapt to that and never recovers from it. It really loses momentum, wanders aimlessly and the pacing for this 2 hour long movie becomes even more sluggish. It doesn’t help that the aforementioned event happens purely for shock reasons and felt so hollow that it almost came across as more comic than tragic. As Sirat enters into its climax, it opts to have even more sequences shocking the audiences in empty ways, and the execution somehow feels borderline slapstick and resembling something out of Looney Tunes. As far as I know, it wasn’t trying for dark comedy, but that’s what all these ‘shocking moments’ come across with how heavy handed they were. I wasn’t invested in the first half, but from the midway point  onwards, I quickly grew completely disconnected from the narrative and characters. I understand that it’s a movie about the journey more than the destination, but I didn’t get anything from this journey. It even flirts with political commentary with a scene or two of soldiers and background chatter on the radio and one would think that it’s trying to say something about colonialism, but all that and the setting of Morocco just ends up solely being a backdrop.

Sergi López delivers a great lead performance, especially conveying his character’s changing head space over the course of the film. Bruno Núñez Arjona is also quite good as his son. The rest of the cast are pretty solid especially for non actors, though their characters don’t have a lot to them.

Óliver Laxe’s direction is solid and the film mostly shines in its technical aspects, and makes for quite a sensory experience. The cinematography is gorgeous, really capturing the desert landscapes and their massive scales, and the editing is great too. The most notable aspect however is its sound, and its Oscar nomination for sound makes sense now. The use of electric music is very effective, sometimes its minimalist, but the constant bass often acts as the beating heart of the movie and is effective at generating a real looming sense of dread.

Sirāt’s narrative isn’t particularly engaging, it really loses itself in the second half, and devolves into something completely hollow by the end. However, it is elevated by its solid direction, stunning visuals, good performances, and effective sound and score. It’s a hard movie to recommend, though I can’t deny that its technical aspects are very strong, and it might be worth checking out for them alone.