‘Sirat’ Review: Lost Souls on a Road Trip Through the Moroccan Desert

Part existential western, part road-trip movie that eventually mutates into a desert-set version of Sorcerer, Sirat is an unusual film, hovering between the fascinating and the baffling. It can deliver a genuinely unsettling scene one moment, then veer toward the absurd just minutes later. It often feels like three different movies unfolding back to back, loosely connected in a way that seems more willful than organic. Shot in the Moroccan desert by the Galician filmmaker Oliver Laxe, the film is almost guaranteed to divide audiences between those who are swept up by its singular cinematic vision and those who leave still trying to figure out what they were meant to take away from it.

I tend to fall closer to the latter group. There is no question that Laxe is a talented, imaginative, and fiercely individual filmmaker. What remains unclear is what he is trying to achieve here, and whether the film actually gets there. On a purely narrative level, the screenplay—co-written with Argentine writer Santiago Fillol—is disarmingly simple. In the Moroccan desert, a massive rave brings together hundreds of people, young and not so young, in search of an experience that is clearly meant to be overwhelming and hallucinatory, part of the free party movement. Into this scene arrives a character who clearly does not belong. Sergi López plays Luis, a man who has traveled there with his young son in search of his missing teenage daughter. He suspects she might be among the ravers, but no one recognizes her.

The party is abruptly shut down by soldiers, with the film hinting at some kind of revolutionary political upheaval in the region that makes it necessary to clear the area. At one point, the soldiers yell at the ravers to “go back to Europe,” an inversion of familiar migration rhetoric that could, in theory, offer a key to interpreting the film. Luis instead follows a convoy of trucks rumored to be heading to another rave—one even more secret and remote, deep in a barely accessible part of the desert. Along for the ride are five other characters: a motley group of men and women, seasoned by years of raves and heavy drug use, some of them missing limbs, all of them seemingly at home in this techno-nomadic world. They form the story’s makeshift surrogate family, though they look less like spiritual seekers than refugees from Mad Max.

From this point on, Sirat settles into the shape of a road movie—at least at first. The early stretches are restrained, almost procedural, focused on the difficulty of the terrain and the sheer effort required to keep the vehicles moving along winding desert paths. Gradually, the tone shifts. What initially feels like an arduous but manageable journey turns dangerous and deeply unsettling, especially after a tragic event that retroactively casts everything that came before as little more than a reckless excursion. The film moves quickly from unease to outright desperation, steadily raising the stakes and undermining Eurocentric fantasies about adventure, freedom, and self-discovery in “exotic” landscapes. If one insists on reading it allegorically, the film can feel like a kind of delayed reckoning—a harsh response from a land long subjected to the projections and abuses of outsiders.

Still, these interpretations remain speculative. Sirat does little to guide the viewer toward any clear conclusions. Laxe’s approach is stripped-down and direct, avoiding overt political statements, conventional psychology, or much contextual grounding about who these people really are or what drives them beyond the immediate moment. As the film progresses, it grows more frantic, more erratic, and increasingly absurd. The characters do not so much free themselves as close in on themselves; rather than rebelling, they become trapped—by the hostile environment, and by the cumulative damage inflicted on it by history and human intervention.

Visually, the film is anchored by Mauro Herce’s precise cinematography, which captures the desert with clarity and restraint. Even as the characters consume drugs, Laxe wisely avoids distorting the image or leaning into obvious visual tricks. Unlike many films set in altered states, Sirat resists visual excess and heavy-handed symbolism. Instead, it aims to generate a shifting emotional experience—unease, fatigue, anxiety, shock—leaving the viewer to wonder whether this sustained tension is a meaningful artistic strategy or simply an exercise in sensory provocation.

Among the many possible reference points, Sorcerer, William Friedkin’s feverish masterpiece about men transporting explosives through a perilous jungle, feels like the closest cinematic cousin. Here the jungle is replaced by the desert, and the characters are not chasing money so much as trying to escape it, but the sense of inexorable doom is strikingly similar. By the end, as the thudding techno music lingers like the ghost of a party long since extinguished, the world begins to look uncomfortably familiar again—and Sirat concludes not with answers, but with a lingering sense of disquiet and unresolved questions.