By Jason Osiason

Sirat hit me like heatstroke. I went in expecting something meditative and got something closer to a trance. It opens on a rave being built from nothing, speaker stacks rising out of the Moroccan desert like a monument, and before the first beat even drops you can feel Oliver Laxe setting a trap. Luis and his son Esteban move through that crowd handing out a photo of Mar, the daughter and sister who vanished five months earlier at a party just like it. What starts as a search turns into a slow unraveling of faith, memory, and control, and before I knew it, the ground was slipping. The film moves like a fever dream, raw, desperate, and hypnotic.

The ravers, Luis and Esteban characters fall in with aren’t really acting so much as being themselves on camera and grimy in ways the film never explains, and that unrefined realness is what makes you trust them.

Then there’s the sound. Kangding Ray’s score is pure sub-bass and pressure, the kind that doesn’t play under a scene so much as sit directly on your chest, and the rave sequences genuinely feel like the speakers whose echoes consume your body. Every cut still feels like a breath you forgot to take. Laxe uses that loudness like a drug, so when the film finally pulls the sound away later, the silence feels like a wound. I didn’t realize how tense I was until the final stretch, when the noise just drops out and you’re left with wind and breathing, a silence that feels physical.

About halfway through, the desert stops being scenery and the movie turns on you so fast it knocks the wind out of you. I won’t spoil it, but the group’s sense of who’s safe gets rewritten in about thirty seconds, and Laxe never lets you settle again. It’s not about the plot anymore at that point, it’s about the feeling of searching for someone who’s already gone, and the guilt of realizing you might be chasing her for your own selfish now.

The ending is what’s stayed with me longest. Without giving anything away, what’s left of the group has to trust a path they can’t see the end of, and Laxe holds on that decision so long it stops feeling like a movie and starts feeling like something happening to you.

I’ll be honest, it’s a lot. The film is exhausting, heavy, sometimes pretentious, but that’s what I love about it. Laxe doesn’t give you an easy out. He makes grief feel like weather, endless and shifting and suffocating. By the time it ended, I didn’t feel closure, I felt released and emptied out in the best way.

Sirat feels alive in a way few films do. It’s ugly, gorgeous, spiritual, and human all at once. [B+]