Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt is the kind of movie that makes you feel a little sick afterward, not because it’s trying to shock you for points, but because it finds a very specific emotional frequency and refuses to let go. It shared the Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and it has since landed a Best International Feature Film nomination at the 98th Academy Awards, which makes sense on paper. But the movie itself does not feel like the typical prestige-title experience. It feels feral.
The setup is deceptively simple. Luis (Sergi López) and his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez) arrive at a rave in the mountains of Morocco looking for Marina, Luis’ missing daughter. When the party gets shut down, they wind up traveling with a small group of ravers, still chasing the faint possibility that Marina is somewhere ahead of them. There’s no comforting procedural spine here, no tidy series of leads and revelations. It’s more like watching grief turn into momentum, and then watching momentum turn into something darker.
Laxe stages the rave material with a kind of hypnotic precision. The music, the bodies, the logistics of this pop-up community, it’s exhilarating in a way that feels earned, not “cool.” And then he contrasts that rush with vast stretches of landscape that make the characters look tiny and disposable. If you’re in tune with desert-crawl movies, you’ll probably think of Mad Max at points, not in imitation, but in the sense of forward motion as a curse. Structurally, it also carries the dread of The Wages of Fear and William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, where the act of continuing is what breaks you. At its most unmoored, it taps into David Lynch territory, the emotional wrongness of Lost Highway and the disorientation of Inland Empire.
What really makes it work, though, is how grounded Sergi López is. He’s playing a father who has to keep moving because stopping would mean accepting something he cannot accept. Bruno Núñez is excellent too, and the father-son dynamic matters because it keeps the movie from turning into pure symbolic misery. Even when the film starts drifting away from concrete goals, you still understand why these two are there, and why they can’t leave.
The middle and back half are where Sirāt becomes borderline brutal. There are a few sequences that genuinely feel haunting in how quickly circumstances collapse, and how matter-of-fact the film is about it. It’s not a crowd-pleaser in the usual sense, even when it’s visually stunning. And I do think some people are going to bounce off the way it loosens its grip on traditional catharsis. The later sections lean hard into mood, implication, and spiritual aftershocks rather than explanation. If you need a clean landing, this is going to feel like the movie walking away from you on purpose – quite literally.
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But I admired that commitment. Sirāt is one of the rare “grief movies” that doesn’t just announce its themes and then ask for applause. It builds a world, then it pulls the floor out, then it keeps going anyway. It’s devastating, formally confident, and frequently breathtaking, even if it’s also a film you might only want to put yourself through once every few years.
Score: 8/10
Sirāt (2026)
- Cast: Sergi López, Bruno Núñez
- Director: Oliver Laxe
- Genre: Drama, Thriller
- Runtime: 115 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: February 13, 2026
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