Sirāt (2025) debuted at Cannes and has since manifested some polar interest. Summarizing it crudely reveals its flaws: it follows a bunch of Europeans gone raving in the middle of the Moroccan desert. The desert is an important thematic setting, but the plot does not interact with the true setting—Morocco; the Sahara—basically at all. Moroccans feature in very few scenes as soldiers, train riders, fuel hawkers, and one solitary goat herder; only in two scenes do they speak. Many of the desert scenes were shot in Spain, which raises yet more questions about the choice of setting.

The movie kicks off when tanks arrive: soldiers break up the rave and announce what turns out to be the beginning of WWIII. It is not a movie about WWIII; rather, it is about avoiding WWIII. The film is motivated by aesthetics, not politics. The director couldn’t shake the image of trucks rolling through the desert for so long that he finally made a movie out of it.

Though I generally eschew the depoliticization of media and excessive reliance on aesthetics, I really enjoyed Sirāt. I am not a raver myself, but I’m close to people who are. I understand raving to be very somatic. This movie is appropriately very concerned with how the body moves through space. One reason the movie is so desolate is to draw attention to the body and how the characters physically counteract that desolation. Their three-vehicle caravan stays clustered together in the open landscape. A grieving character wakes up being snuggled in a puppy pile. The rave itself is a sea of bodies bustling together despite the very open space, cradled by a perimeter of speakers.

The film is certainly not capital-P political. The characters are Spanish, French, and English by birth, drawn to Morocco only for the rave. The political implications of this are in no way explored, though at least two of the characters speak some amount of Arabic. Their closest interaction with anywhere but the desert is through a radio feed they constantly shut off mid-stream.

But their world—the one they build amongst themselves—is starkly rendered. The movie focuses on Luis and his son Esteban, who are looking for their daughter/sister at the desert rave; they are our surrogate characters into the ravers’ world, which is full of kindness, empathy, and mutual aid. It is clear that they love each other deeply, and that love ultimately extends to helping Luis and Esteban on their quest.

The ravers themselves are the highlight of the movie. The actors are non-professionals who lent their names to their characters. Two are amputees; at least one is trans; all the ravers seem to be habitual drug users. The exact nature of their relationships with each other is perhaps deliberately ambiguous. This is all treated as normal: none of it (except the drugs, which are used transparently) is called out in the film.

Critics find the characters’ thin backgrounds to be among the film’s flaws. It is true that if the characters have any contacts left in the world now embroiled in war, they show no indication of concern. But they are also clearly shown to be actively disinterested in engaging with their pasts directly; their pasts instead shape them in subtler ways. At one point, a character is asked if he misses his family, and he thinks for a moment before saying that he doesn’t; he prefers the family he has now. The characters reveal something about themselves in when they do or don’t slip into their first languages. Another character engages his amputated leg in a performance of the anti-war folk song Le Déserteur, suggesting a past political enough for him to know the song by heart but long enough ago for him to fumble a verse. (h/t to Kyle for tracking that down.)

Anyone who’s studied gender, critical race, or disability theory will tell you the body is a site of social politics. The film isn’t concerned with capital-P politics; but I don’t think it’s right to call it apolitical. The ensemble cast may be categorically European, but they transgress in other ways. Their bodies, their priorities, and their presence in the so-called “middle of nowhere” all speak to the social politics of their pasts and presents. Each character is viewed through the lens of where they currently are—here in the desert with other outcasts, raving, helping Luis—rather than how society at large responds to them.

Their isolation from the rest of society, even from their own pasts, struck me as the exact point of the movie. They are perhaps not the huddled masses, but they may be among the wretched refuse. They have entirely and deliberately left behind the world that has treated them as such in favour of loving each other, chasing beats and highs, and honouring their bodies and themselves.

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Spoilers for the movie from this point on.

The film’s opening epigraph explains that sirāt is the Arabic word (to my recollection, Islam is not mentioned) for, if you’ll pardon my paraphrase, the razor-thin bridge to paradise spanning over hell. Immediately my culturally Christian mind converted this notion to purgatory, and believing the characters occupied a form of purgatory entirely underpinned how I read the film.

Like the ravers, Luis and Esteban seem to have abandoned their wider lives in favour of their quest for Mar (Spanish for “sea”—searching for water in the desert). Critics point out that it’s not clear where Esteban’s mother is, or why they are looking so intensively for Mar given that she is explicitly noted to be an adult. But this does not seem any more relevant to the movie than the ravers’ pasts. What matters is the here and now: Luis, Esteban, and the ravers have so doggedly neglected everything else that they have, in some ways, ceased to live in the world. They are all at a point where they will either find their way out, or they will die in pursuit of their singular motivation—the mythical desert rave, or the myth of a daughter who wants to be found. Tellingly, they begin the movie by driving deeper into the desert, choosing the isolation and alienation it offers. It’s an active and deliberate disengagement from the world at large.

So what to make of who does and doesn’t make it out of this version of sirāt or purgatory? It doesn’t seem that innocence is rewarded, nor sin necessarily punished. It seems unjust and random who makes it out and who doesn’t; but this spoke to me, too, as a non-religious person preoccupied with the universe’s randomness. As Jade tells Luis: you never know when a speaker will make its last sound. Why does any one person recover from addiction or fail to do so? How many who lose family members never move on, while others find their way back to the land of the living? Each of us knows someone who has entered their own form of purgatory; each of us knows their emergence is not guaranteed. Sometimes the difference is made by wealth, luck, or genetics, other times by support or experience. Sometimes nothing seems to work. Sometimes, even when you are singularly devoted to outrunning the war, it blows you up anyway. Seldom is reason behind it. Seldom is it a matter of purity or sin. Sometimes people who have learned love and support better than most want nothing more than to disappear into the desert. Sometimes brakes fail. Sometimes your friends push you out of a pothole. Sometimes your foot falls wrong. Sometimes you just had the good sense to follow people who will pick you up from the sand.

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Watching movies together—more to the point, dissecting them afterward—has become very dear to me in my relationship with my partner, who suggested this one and whose analysis is interspersed throughout this essay. Kyle was surprised that I enjoyed it, and reasonably; a few years ago I might not have. He also seems surprised that he’s still not sure how he feels about it a day later.

We were talking again this morning about the movie’s relationship to politics or lack thereof, and I described how I read the performance of Le Déserteur. War is a major theme of the film. Its final events have nothing to do with the war the characters are avoiding, but it’s another manifestation of that same apocalyptic horseman. We don’t know how Tonin lost his leg, but veterans and amputees commonly co-occur. There is a line as they are listening to the radio where one character asks—staring into the desert, which remains unchanged—if this is what the end of the world is like; another answers that it has been ending for a long time. They have long seen this coming, and they deserted long ago.

Deserting, too, is a political choice. As the song goes (feat. my pithy translation):

Monsieur le Président (Mr. President)
Je ne veux pas la faire (I don’t want to go to war)
Je ne suis pas sur terre (I wasn’t put on this Earth)
Pour tuer des pauvres gens (to massacre the poor)
C'est pas pour vous fâcher (I’m not trying to make you mad)
Il faut que je vous dise (I’m just letting you know)
Ma décision est prise (I’ve made my choice)
Je m'en vais déserter (I’m out, I’ve got to go)

Leaving it all behind is a political choice, and—informed by their personal or political pasts—these characters make it. But they still help each other at the individual level, because they are compassionate people. Faced with a world bent on destruction, perhaps bent on destroying them, that’s what they feel is left to them: seeking their bliss and helping who they can, when they can. It’s what’s left to many of us: to witness or endure, seek our bliss, attempt to function, and help our neighbours. Some seek more bliss than others; some function more than others. It doesn’t matter. We can still help our neighbours.

Kyle said that sounded like a better movie than the one he actually saw. Maybe that’s right. Maybe my biases made meaning from the muddle. Maybe that’s a tendency I’m glad to have.