The era is over. But what can come has not yet begun.
— Giorgio Agamben
There are works that do not merely represent the world but etch into it. These are not images—they are wounds. Sirat, the third feature film by Óliver Laxe, moves within this liminal space, this fissure between the visible and the unspeakable. It is not a film to be understood, but one to be traversed. Like a path that promises nothing but the trial. Like a threshold. Like a blade.
The title is already a revelation: Sirat—the eschatological bridge of Islamic tradition, finer than a hair and stretched over Hell—is the line each soul must walk on Judgment Day to reach its destiny. But Sirat is also the Greek poros: a fragile passage, a point of crisis, a bottleneck between what disintegrates and what—perhaps—can be saved. Those who pass do not return. Those who do not, fall. The film is entirely poised on that razor-thin edge separating the West from its own downfall. Because the end—clear from the very first frames—is not a future event. It has already begun. Long ago. It is happening now. It is our condition.
We live in times where we survive our own end.
— Jean Baudrillard
The opening is a vertigo: a forty-minute rave set in the Moroccan desert. A lysergic and hypnotic party, devoid of exoticism or liberation. It is a post-utopian orgy, a ritual of emotional resistance where the music—splendid, magnetic, pounding—is not meant to be heard but danced to. To vibrate whatever part of the body still responds. We are in Kantian sublimity, but reversed: not the elevation of the spirit before nature, but a psycho-sensory disorientation in the face of the unknowable, the brutality of the landscape, a beauty that wounds, the unpleasant pleasure of an enjoyment that does not free but annihilates. Kant would speak of the “dynamic sublime,” when nature’s forces threaten to annihilate the body, yet the mind proves stronger, enduring. But in Sirat, this mechanism jams: reason never triumphs over the desert, and the sublime remains an open wound.
The initial appearance—that of a study of rave culture, with its aesthetics of excess, trance, and temporary community—is only the fragile surface of a work that, from the outset, proceeds by subtraction, dismantling the symbolic coordinates of the West to expose its nakedness: the need for control, the incapacity to listen, the belief that every space can be turned into experience, every moment into consumption, every body into function. But Sirat is built precisely against this logic of domination. It lets fractures, silences, and untamable territories speak.
In the opening rave of Sirat, where the West surrenders to dance amid mutilation and synaptic beats, the celebration is never secular—it is liturgical. Consumption, disorientation, purposelessness—everything is sacrifice offered to a silent deity, without redemption. A religion without questions, founded on guilt and infinite debt. The desert party, with its hypnotic rhythms, is a ritual that renews the cult of the end.
Dance is but the spiritual exercise of sacrifice.
— Antonin Artaud
The dancing bodies are not whole. Visible mutilations cross the frame as physical testimonies of unresolved trauma: missing legs, covered eyes, limping gaits. They are excessive, spectral presences—relics of a humanity that survived something unspeakable. Figures dancing without a future. As if time had shattered, leaving only the repetition of a final instant.
The bodies surrendered to dance are not merely characters: they are remains. What is left of a humanity deserted by itself. In this, they are already beyond life and death. There is no longer an “after” to strive for, yet they go. As if the end—long begun—is not an obstacle, but a catalyst: what makes them finally human. Laxe sketches in these characters the paradoxical form of sanctity through excess, of the sacred through devastation.
The desert, setting for this collective trance, is not backdrop or frame. It is character, judge, other entity. A labyrinth, like Borges': not a space to decipher, but one that dissolves all bearings. One does not cross the desert—it is the desert that crosses you. Paths multiply, are lost, fold in on themselves. The real blurs with the mirage. And in the mirage, one is truly lost. Minefields, sudden explosions, encirclements: places of initiation. This is not symbolism—it is the real returning violently in the heart of a toxic dream.
To walk in the desert is to choose a homeland without land.
— Mahmoud Darwish
Each step may be the last. As in the Sirat rite, those who cross do not know if they will fall into the abyss or be saved—but the very act of walking is an ethical act. Moving into nothingness as a responsibility, even if no one waits on the other side.
Thus, the party reveals what it always was: not a moment of liberation, but of occupation. The West, in its terminal narcissism, dances atop a battlefield. Euphoria is a cover. Music, an anesthetic weapon. Utopia, a free zone built on the exclusion of the other.
This marks the real passage—not narrative but ontological. Mar’s disappearance—young woman, daughter, sister—is the initial rupture. Her absence forces her father Luis and brother Esteban into an elsewhere. But their search is not investigation—it is procession. A secular pilgrimage within an alien world that nonetheless welcomes them. The question is not “where did Mar go?”, but: “what right do we still have to search, we who helped lose everything?”
The journey becomes political, then metaphysical. The search for Mar—absent figure, unreachable body, threshold—gradually morphs into the existential condition of an entire generation drifting through void, amid coordinates that no longer respond, in a world unable to read its own collapse. Along the way they encounter other wanderers, other human remains who reject order. Deserters of the real, they bear the marks of voluntary shipwreck: amputations, missing teeth, torn bodies. Not martyrs, not heroes. Simply products of a world that broke its promises. A generation that chose the abyss rather than continue dwelling in the fiction of progress.
The turning point is the Moroccan army’s forced clearing of the rave. An authoritarian gesture that silences the music and with it, all illusions of innocence. Bodies must leave, return to where they came from. But not all obey. Luis and Esteban, driven by fragile hope, choose to desert. In this seemingly minimal gesture lies a radical act: rejecting the established order, including the Western authority that feigns neutrality, that cloaks violence in the “right to party.”
What follows is an odyssey through nothingness. A blind movement in a landscape that refuses to answer. As if the desert itself were tired of European questions. The film offers no catharsis, no resolution. On the contrary, it takes shape as a pedagogy of disillusionment: a ruthless reflection on the nameless war already running through us, present in the fibers of the West itself, in its blindness, in its diffuse irresponsibility. A war that no longer opposes two armies, but two incompatible visions of the world: domination versus survival.
Thus we realize that Sirat is not set in a hypothetical future but in a present too afraid to call itself such. A third world war needing no flags or declarations: the war of order against possibility, identity against errancy, memory against desire. In this framework, Mar’s figure dissolves. No longer daughter, no longer person. She becomes an idea—perhaps a promised land, perhaps a lost frontier. Mar is sea, but also Morocco, but also martyrdom. She is all that the West tries to find outside itself, failing to see that its disorientation is not a loss—but a guilt.
In the end, only the ethical question remains. Not “Where are we?” Not “Who are we?” But rather: what right do we have to be here? What authorizes us to traverse the world as if it belonged to us, to seek meaning in places we have silenced with our passage? In a universe that has lost even the concept of a “right path,” how do we move without turning every step into an offense?
The Arabic word aṣ-Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm, from which the title takes shape, denotes the path that leads to salvation. But the way is no longer drawn. Today, the path is stumbled through, in darkness, among ruins. And perhaps we are no longer allowed to walk it. Perhaps we must first learn to stand still. To question meaning.
Laxe films with visionary rawness. The images are dry, sharp—at times hypnotic, at times hostile. As if the film’s very gaze were now incapable of absolving or explaining. Cinema here is not language—it is event. It is judgment. Every face the protagonists meet—mutilated, migrant, child soldier, remains of community—is a mute verdict on the West’s failure. There is no pity, no redemption. Only the step to take. On the blade.
Sirat is also this: a radical political question. It is not about the future. It concerns us—now. Can we still cross that bridge? Do we deserve to? Are we lucid enough to recognize that catastrophe is not impending but already occurred—and what we are living is merely its long, aestheticized, dancing, spectacular tail? The film does not answer. But it forces the question. In silence.
In the end—or rather, in its evaporation—Sirat suspends itself. Like held breath, like a step in mid-air. Because there is no catharsis. No resolution. The bridge remains—thin as a hair, stretched over the abyss. And each of us is already walking it. Whether we want to or not.
Not all human works come in the form of ordered, recognizable, classifiable constructions. Sometimes, they emerge as cracks in language itself—fissures on the unstable edge of civilization. Sirat is not simply a film. It is a collision field, an active fault line where the ruins of a weary Europe meet the refractory presence of an elsewhere that refuses to be assimilated or explained. No foothold, no stable reading. What remains is a slow collapse, an inward spiraling that becomes a philosophical-political exploration of a world unable to recognize its own limits.
A monumental, deafening, invasive work. An unequivocal, urgent experience. One not to be overlooked.
You do not leave hell to be saved. You leave to cross it.
— Simone Weil
