Critics reviews

Sirāt, a mesmerizingly uneasy film from Galician director Oliver Laxe, sets up a devastating narrative feint.

Laxe’s focus on existential dangers never seems like an intellectual assault or a nihilistic bleat but rather an assertion of life in its raw totality. He’s very adept at seducing and charming you, but it’s his insistence on asking so much of you as a viewer, including your indulgence for other people’s frailties — for their humanity — that makes this beguiling, flawed, at times bonkers movie so deeply moving.

[N]othing about the pulsating “Sirāt” is appropriate or expected or traditional or fully comprehensible. It just is. And it is utterly transfixing.

[Sirāt] is not for everyone. But it is the sort of overwhelming cinematic experience and undeniable work of sound and vision that could be life-changing for those ready to receive it.

The movie begins in exhilaration and concludes in despair, and what unfolds in between is an experience of singularly turbulent and transfixing power; for sheer visceral excitement and sustained emotional force, I haven’t encountered its equal this year.

“Sirāt” is taut and riveting and nearly all mood. You feel the exhilaration of veering off the path, the self-exile of speeding toward nowhere, the dread that this caravan has veered too far for its own safety.

The fear of loss, and loneliness, is pervasive in Laxe’s tale and, concurrently, his frame; collaborating with cinematographer Maura Herce, his visuals have a frightening remoteness and singed beauty that express these nomads’ tortured hearts and minds.

[Sirât] is a vivid meditation on human possibility in the face of fate and nature’s tumultuous might, ending in a fog of ambiguity that mirrors the characters’ bewilderment. This is foremost a film about the power of feeling over understanding, which is sometimes the only antidote to a world that continues to grow more confusing and unstable.

It has a pervading sense of Mad Max: Fury Road about it or even Henri-George Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear but with a poetry and rigour all of its own which exerts an arresting and haunting grip.

[Sirat] draws you out of your seat with a mighty succession of sonic rumbles, then promptly knocks you back into it with the most jolting of tragedies... Laxe’s movie is both a nightmarish experience and an exhilarating one—a pitiless ordeal that is nonetheless underpinned by extraordinary love and tenderness.

With its earth-shattering techno-flavoured sound design and awe-inspiring cinematography of the arid North African landscape, this is also, it should be noted, the most ravishingly epic of this year's entrants – and that combined with its shock factor could well make it a watercooler film beyond the festival circuit.

Óliver Laxe (Fire Will Come) detonates the kind of jaw-dropping plot swerve that would upend a lesser movie. Here, however, it’s merely a signal for the film to dive, with furious abandon, to even darker, weirder and unforeseeable places. This is original, explosive (literally — you’ll see!) and ovation-worthy, cinema.