Well, you can’t say they didn’t warn us. “Sirât,” the Oliver Laxe film that had its world premiere in the main competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, opens with titles that describe the Sirât bridge as one that leads to paradise but is fiendishly difficult to cross without falling off into hell.
So when virtually all of the movie’s characters end up in hellish circumstances, an audience should have no reason to act surprised, even if the viewers at a Cannes press screening took to a little nervous laughter as the horrors mounted in the brutal homestretch of the film.
Of course, that’s part of the point for Laxe. The director, born in France but raised in the Galician community in Spain, has made four features, all of which have premiered in Cannes. He often works with non-professional actors and always has a keen eye for the social and political ills of the day, and he has called “Sirât” his most political film to date.
As such, it’s one of a growing number of 2025 Cannes films that use a variety of genres, settings and historical eras to quietly suggest that we live in dark, dangerous and troubled times. Laxe isn’t subtle about it – at one point, a character says, “Is this what the end of the world feels like?” – but his film makes it clear that if humanity is traversing a bridge that could lead to paradise or to hell, the misstep that will plunge it in the wrong direction is likely.
The film begins with workmen’s hands setting up stacks of monstrous speakers in the Moroccan desert for a rave that will take place in the shadow of dramatic rock cliffs. When the drug-fueled dance party is in full swing, Luis (Sergi López) and his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) wander through the crowd handing out photos of Luis’ daughter, who has been missing for months and is rumored to be at the rave.
They don’t find her, but they find some reluctant allies in a ragtag tribe of ravers. One is missing a foot, another is missing a hand, all look like they’ve been through the wars and all are played by non-pros whose character names are suspiciously similar to their real ones. Together, they create a vivid sense of community, aided by a sound design that uses the deep, booming pulse of electronic dance music as a heartbeat of sorts. One of the ravers, Stef (Stefania Gadda), has a habit of reclaiming broken speakers, which she loves for their unpredictable sonic imperfections; it’s a little on-the-nose as a metaphor for the tribe itself, but it works.
When the group tells Luis that his daughter might be at another upcoming rave across the desert, the desperate father decides that he and Esteban will follow the ravers there – a journey made more perilous by the fact that an unspecified war breaks out and every mile becomes harder to navigate. The film becomes another example of the “it’s the journey, not the destination” genre, a road movie in the shadow of what might be a localized conflict or might be World War III. Think of it as “Mad Max” without the stunts or the fun.
At one point about two-thirds of the way through the film, a minor mishap with a truck forces the travelers to stop and work out a solution. At this point, Laxe goes heavy on the ominous vibes, and he’s not just messing with us — a horrible thing happens, and from that point on the film is a string of catastrophes.
There are moments of beauty and release here: If these are indeed the last remnants of humanity, they might as well reach for whatever rapture they can find by downing some hallucinogens and dancing by themselves in the middle of the desolation. But eventually, there’s so much apocalyptic overkill going on that it almost becomes comic, and it definitely becomes hard to accept the modest grace notes that Laxe eventually offers his characters and his audience.
Another Cannes entry that seems unlikely to have much life outside of European arthouses, “Sirât” is bold in its depiction of a decaying world in which some people can still find release. But its insistent brutality feels less bold than exhausting, and the question asked by one of the characters – “Is this what the end of the world feels like?” – has an easy answer: Hell, yeah.
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