Since I’m pretty late to the game with this one, I doubt there’s much interest in my review, but I did find that I wanted to talk about this.

Spoilers… but I’ll warn you.

Sirât is Spain’s candidate for the Oscar’s this year. Not that it means much. Just that some committee in the Spain decided that this movie could be the one that has the best chance of winning the International Film or whatever it’s called these days.

With that in mind, the whole film happens in Morocco. We get an explanation early on that Sirât is the perilous bridge to Heaven everyone must cross on the day of resurrection. Failing to do so will cause the person to fall into Hell. That should give one an idea on what the movie is about.

Actually, the movie takes a few very hard pivots. Basically quickly moving from one type of movie to another. It starts with a man and his son looking for their missing daughter/sister, then we move onto a kind of a road movie where these two befriend a group of ravers and then we move onto something completely different.

The tagline/subtitle of the movie in Finnish is ‘Reivit maailman laidalla’ or ‘Rave at the edge of the world’. We start at a rave in the desert in Morocco and the group is going to another rave in the desert in Morocco (although, they say close to the border of Mauritania and as far as I know, those two countries don’t have a border, but on the other hand, the border between Morocco and Western Sahara can be pretty volatile due to lack of government in the latter country and Moroccon claims to it, so maybe there is. I don’t know. Anyhow, the first 20 minutes or so, we are bombarded by techno (pretty good techno, actually). People have come together in the desert to do this and apparently, they are pretty well organized, since they can do that in the middle of nowhere with quite a few people.

The event is stopped by a civil war breaking out in Morocco. Everyone is put into a convoy to be led out of the country. However, two cars make a break for it to get to another rave (how do they know it’s going to happen despite the war is a big question here, but let’s not worry about that) and our father and son decide to follow them in the hope that the person they are looking for is going to be there.

I saw one review that made a pretty big leap: One of the ravers is wearing a Freaks (1932) shirt. The reviewer claimed that this is significant, because the ravers can be seen as freaks. That felt pretty harsh to me. Sure, they seem to be broken people. They’ve probably spent decades just doing this: traveling from rave to rave, taking drugs and just letting themselves go for a while. Sure, some of them are literally broken (one of the them is missing a leg and another has a stunted arm), but that does not make someone a freak. At least not to me. Now, as I can’t imagine myself doing this, but I know people who dream of this kind of life without responsibilities, I kind of understand them, but I can’t claim to understand them fully.

However, they are just pretty normal people. They just have a different lifestyle. We don’t know why they ended there, but that doesn’t really matter. We know why the man and his son are there, though, but their reason kind of just vanishes. It’s mentioned again, but it doesn’t really hold much meaning in the story except that it’s the reason the two of them are there.

The war is also forgotten for large chunks of the movie. They do choose to take a road through the mountains instead of the highway to avoid it and that does come into play.

Now, with movies like this, I always wonder who the planned audience is. The theater I was at had quite a few older people in it. I doubt they were there to listen to pumping techno for 20 minutes at the start. The second act is much more classic drama with the two groups coming together to care for each other. I heard a few of them trying to come to terms with what was happening in the movie and it appears that they just forgot the explanation for the movie, which probably made it much harder to understand.

It is a good movie, but also hard to recommend, because it is so many different things. It almost feels like three episodes of a series edited into one movie. In this regard it’s even more obvious than something like It’s Such a Beautiful Day (which is three short movies edited into a feature). It is well done and has cool visuals of the mountainous desert and I like the actors who are not your traditional troupe.

Okay, so spoilers…

So, the movie takes on a whole new feel after the son (and his dog) dies accidentally. The father is too shocked to really understand it, but it does bring them all closer together, which leads to their own little minirave in the desert, where they take some kind of a hallucinogen and dance in the desert. However, this is interrupted by one of them walking into a mine, leaving the rest stranded (wind removed their tracks).

This is were the Sirât comes in. Getting to Heaven is a leap of faith. Only after letting go, the remaining people survive their way out of the minefield, while their calculated attempts to do so fail.

the things is that the pivot is kind of hard and maybe even rough for some people. Our cozy little road movie about found families just becomes this movie about the inability to deal with sorrow which, for a fleeting moment, becomes a war movie of sorts. I can see how this could feel unsatisfying, if you didn’t pay attention in the beginning. The movie told you what was about to happen by telling you about the Sirât. Our players are trying to cross a perilous bridge. I guess the cruel part is that they don’t know… and that the kid falls first.

A big jump here: One of my many big problems with the Bible is the story of Job and, while the idea of Sirât comes from Islam (though not Qu’ran), that is the same God, how that God keeps killing people to fuck with Job. Job loses everything. His whole family dies as he is being tested. When the tests are done, he just finds new ones.

Okay, so how is that supposed to be a consolation for all the people who died just because God let Satan fuck with Job? They lost their lives for nothing, because the patriarch (and slave-owner, if I remember correctly) is more important than everyone else combined, because it’s all about him. Did the kid die just so that the dad can get tested? If so, that is fucked up.

For the ravers, this is less obvious, but they just randomly lose two of their own to mines before they figure out what’s going on and what to do. Were those similar sacrifices to test the rest of them?

I do kind of think things evolve too fast in the end. Before the death of the son, there hasn’t really been much of an obstacle to them before that.