Halfway Across / Sirat

A movie by Oliver Laxe, 2025.

A wall of speakers stands in front of me. Kangding Ray’s soundtrack pushes through the room with a density that feels almost material, while bodies projected onto the screen move in rhythmic waves across the Moroccan desert. For a moment, the distinction between film and environment becomes unstable: sound spills outside the image, and the room begins to behave like an extension of the film itself. This was the condition of the immersive screening organized at BASE in Milan. Sirat, the latest film by Óliver Laxe, is a work that resists passive viewing. It operates through pressure, sonic, spatial, and emotional, until spectators stop observing from a distance and begin inhabiting the film’s conditions.

Cinema rarely ends when the lights come back on. It ends later, when the body begins to register what it has been subjected to. The moment I anticipate most in any film is its ending. Not because I am eager to leave the theater, but because the closing credits mark the point at which impressions start to take shape as thoughts. During the screening, they remain suspended, partial, unstable. Only afterward can they begin to settle into language. With Sirat, that process is unusually difficult. Winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the film moves with a quiet but relentless logic. Its opening gesture is already a warning: the title refers to the bridge that, in Islamic tradition, souls must cross on the Day of Judgment. The Sirat, thin as a hair, sharp as a blade, connects paradise (Janna) to hell (Jahannam). The idea inevitably recalls another literary threshold: the inscription at the gates of hell in The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter.” Both structures serve the same narrative function: they establish that once the crossing begins, return is no longer guaranteed. Sirat adopts that logic almost immediately.

The title refers to the bridge that, in Islamic tradition, souls must cross on the Day of Judgment. The Sirat, thin as a hair, sharp as a blade, connects paradise (Janna) to hell (Jahannam). The idea inevitably recalls another literary threshold: the inscription at the gates of hell in The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter.”

The first images show a rave unfolding in the Moroccan desert. Speaker stacks rise like temporary monuments against the landscape. Around them, bodies move in collective rhythm, less like individual dancers than components of a shared organism. Circling the scene are two figures who soon become the film’s axis: Luis, searching for his missing daughter Mar, and Esteban, the son accompanying him. Their path intersects with a group of ravers, Jade, Tonin, Josh, and Stef, who suggest that Mar may have moved on to another gathering somewhere deeper in the desert. No one knows exactly where. When the army arrives and forces everyone to disperse, Luis decides to follow the group further into the desert. Only at that moment does the title appear on screen: Sirāt. The journey begins there. The film visually marks the transition through a simple but precise image: a thin white line dividing the road that stretches ahead of the two groups as they drive away together. It functions almost like a diagram of the film’s premise. From that point onward the story no longer behaves like a search narrative. The missing daughter gradually becomes secondary.

What takes its place is something closer to a descent, an irreversible movement toward loss. At one point, Luis voices the doubt that hangs over the journey: “This doesn’t make sense. We shouldn’t have come. What are we doing?” The film quietly suggests that the only moment when a different decision could have been made was earlier, when the army first arrived. Turning back was still possible then. After that point, the narrative moves forward with a kind of fatal momentum. The presence of the army also establishes a wider temporal horizon. Radio broadcasts mention geopolitical tensions and the possibility of an approaching global conflict. These fragments remain sparse, but they place the film unmistakably within the present. The apocalypse here is not speculative; it resembles the atmosphere already surrounding contemporary life.

“Perdition, in other words, does not begin with the journey. It precedes it.”

To avoid checkpoints, the group chooses mountain roads, steep, narrow, and unstable. During this detour, Luis and Esteban slowly observe the social structure of the group they have joined. The values guiding rave culture, mutual aid, hospitality, and collective care emerge not as slogans but as practical behaviors. There is no heroic individualism here. Problems are addressed collectively. At one point, a vehicle becomes stuck on uneven ground. Luis leaves the car to help the others push it free. Esteban remains behind. The handbrake was never engaged. What follows occurs almost entirely outside the frame. The car rolls backward down the slope before anyone can intervene. The film does not dramatize the moment; it simply removes Esteban from the story. The mountain, traditionally the place closest to the divine, becomes the setting for one of the film’s most devastating reversals. No moral logic governs the event. No symbolic protection exists for innocence. Loss in Sirāt is absolute.

The group’s grief becomes collective. Luis’s mourning spreads through the others, dissolving the fragile boundary that previously separated them. Yet the film refuses to pause for long. Movement resumes the following morning. They stop in an immense open stretch of desert near another mountain range. Two speakers are placed in the sand, and music begins again. The scene resembles a ritual more than a celebration. Each person dances alone within a small radius, yet the choreography produces an unexpected sense of connection. Then the landscape reveals its final condition. The ground beneath them is a minefield. Explosions interrupt the ritual abruptly. Jade first. Then Tonin. The choreography becomes chaos. By the time the dust settles, only a few figures remain: Luis, Josh, and Stef. It is Luis who approaches the mountain. When the others ask how he managed to cross the field without triggering another explosion, he answers with a sentence that reorganizes the entire film: “You mustn’t think about anything.” The statement initially sounds incomprehensible. How can a father who has just lost his son refuse thought? Only later does its logic become clearer. The earlier catastrophe has emptied Luis of every remaining expectation: about his daughter, about survival, about meaning itself.

“That emptiness becomes his only protection. Without attachments, there is nothing left for fear to hold onto. In that sense the minefield merely externalizes a condition that already existed internally.”

The film ends with the remaining characters on a train. Once again, the image of a line appears, the railway tracks extending toward an unseen destination. The shot lingers long enough to provoke a final uncertainty: is this the conclusion of the crossing, or merely another segment of the bridge? The film offers no answer. What remains is a persistent sense of vacancy. Not resolution, not redemption, simply the aftermath of survival. Calling these characters “survivors” may itself be misleading.

The immersive screening at BASE intensified this dynamic by placing the audience inside the film’s sonic architecture. The soundtrack by Kangding Ray operates less like accompaniment than like terrain: low frequencies mimic the pressure of the desert, while distorted rhythms replicate the instability of the characters’ movement across it. This year, the composer received an Academy Awards nomination for his work. The recognition is notable not simply as a personal milestone, but because it signals something about the institution itself. Music emerging from experimental electronic contexts, historically distant from Hollywood scoring traditions, rarely becomes legible within the Academy’s framework. When it does, the moment deserves scrutiny. Recognition can broaden institutional boundaries, but it can also neutralize the outsider energy that made the work distinctive in the first place. Sirat exists precisely within that tension. The film’s visual language reinforces it. Cinematographer Mauro Herce repeatedly frames bodies as diminishing figures against immense landscapes, emphasizing both isolation and exposure. The desert ceases to function as a mere setting; it becomes a testing ground, a space where social, emotional, and metaphysical structures collapse. Under those conditions, the Sirat is no longer a distant theological metaphor. It becomes a contemporary condition.

“Watching the film leaves one final question suspended: are we approaching the bridge, or have we already stepped onto it without noticing? The present often resembles the latter.”