Sirât: ‘ovation-worthy’ desert survival thriller

This “sun-torn survival thriller” from French-Spanish director Oliver Laxe doesn’t “merely rack its audience’s nerves”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph, it stretches “them out to banjo-string tightness”. A deeply unconventional film, it is in large part like “‘Mad Max’ by way of David Lynch” – there’s a race across a desert to help a girl in trouble – but the details remain “unnervingly opaque”.

The girl in question is a young Spaniard who travelled to Morocco to go to a rave, and has since disappeared. Her father Luis (Sergi López) has come out to look for her, and has brought his son and their dog along for moral support. He decides to throw in his lot with a ragtag band of other clubbers heading to a rave near the border with Mauritania but, before long, military convoys start rumbling past and “the missing person mystery we think is taking shape swerves drastically off course”.

The early set pieces are “gobsmacking” and, as the party wagons head across the desert, headlights blaring, a Kangding Ray techno score “only adds to the futuristic undertow”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. The “jaw-dropping plot swerve” that comes an hour in would derail a lesser movie; here, it’s just a signal for the narrative to dive, with “furious abandon”, into even darker, weirder places. This is an “explosive” and “ovation-worthy” film, and a reason to actually go to a cinema.

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If Sirât deserves a prize, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, it is for most over-praised film of the year. Yes, it is visually striking, and its first ten minutes are gripping; but what follows is an oppressive journey of “non-meaning”, as what was initially intriguing becomes exasperating, and ultimately ridiculous.