Movie Review: A punishing, hypnotic desert rave in Oliver Laxe’s Oscar-nominated 'Sirāt'

Laxe opens his film with a group of men methodically setting up speakers in the arid expanse of the Sahara. The desert terrain is vast; the surrounding mountains ominous and humbling. And then, the music starts — blaring, pulsating, crashing into the silence. Suddenly a crowd is just there, vibrating to the sounds in ecstatic reverie. It feels like ages before a word is uttered.

The people that break the spell don’t seem to fit in with the malnourished, tattooed vagabonds swaying and bouncing in a trance. It’s a barrel-chested father Luis (a fantastic Sergi López ), his 12-year-old son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) and their dog. They’re not there by accident: They’re looking for their daughter and sister who left months ago; They suspect it was for this party at the end of the world, or something like it.

The war, or whatever it is, outside is left vague. There’s chatter of migrants and military. Among the ravers, there’s a kind of hopeless resignation to it all as they drift from rave to rave. One quips that the world has been ending for a long time. That this one family is still attempting to hold onto traditional ties is disarming, to say the least.

But Luis is determined to continue the search for his daughter and decides to follow a caravan on to the next site despite their protestations that his van is not up for the journey. Luis and Esteban are generous travel companions, gifting precious rations and paying for gas. The ravers (Jade Oukid, Stefania Gadda, Tonin Janvier, Richard Bellamy and Joshua Liam Henderson) have more of a wall up. They’ve been living a postapocalyptic life for too long, but they start to soften to this family nonetheless. And then, halfway through the film, the rug is pulled out from under everyone.

Perhaps by this point the surprises of “Sirāt” are already well spoiled, but for those who don’t know, the shock is kind of the point of the whole experience. And there’s still almost an hour of film left to go, in which everyone, including the audience, is in a sort of hallucinatory, post traumatic daze — but even the relative comfort of that won’t last long.

We see death all the time in films; It’s alarming how often it barely even registers. It’s a testament to the filmmaking in “Sirāt” that here it's so deeply upsetting. I’m not sure “Sirāt” can even be categorized as a survival movie. It’s more like a descent into oblivion. For some that might be spiritual. For others, it might feel more like the depths of despair.

As a piece of cinema, “Sirāt” is astonishing. As a contribution to humanity, however, its value is debatable. Art certainly doesn’t have to make us feel good all, or even most of the time. Must it make us feel as bad as “Sirāt?” Maybe? “Sirāt” is the kind of film that will get under your skin and fester, the kind that will leave you with a pit in your stomach. Perhaps simply knowing that going in is enough. It might also be a litmus test for just how long you might hold onto hope at the end of the world. I, for one, would have been out before the first rave began.

“Sirāt,” a Neon release currently playing in limited release and expanding Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “some violent content, language, drug use.” Running time: 115 minutes. Three stars out of four.