Sirāt (2025, Oliver Laxe)

59/100

Raves: not even once.

[I guess there's one minor SPOILER below.]

Harrowing, to be sure, and it's arguably my own fault that the punishment our heroes(?) endure seemed wildly disproportionate. Or maybe Laxe's contextualization is overly subtle. In any case, it didn't register at the outset that some enormous world conflict's a-brewin', and later allusions to same I took as mere hyperbole, e.g. Bigui asking "So has World War III broken out? Is this what the end of the world feels like?" seemed to be nothing more than a response to driving treacherous roads in bad weather. (Oliver, don't give him that line when the rain's apocalyptic.) However, understanding that retroactively makes large stretches of Sirāt play even more like the ultimate expression of a trope that now mostly annoys me, which I at some point (think it was Return to Seoul) gave the name Dance Your Pain Away. Did not care at all for its post-tragedy recurrence, which seemed to be advocating for EDM as the best medicine for trauma...and while that sequence goes somewhere very unexpected, which was welcome, it does so via the incredible idiocy of a character shouting "Let's blow it up!" (or words to that effect; depends on who's subtitling) exactly one second before she herself in fact blows up. Can't believe anyone thought that was a good idea (and were proud enough to have it referenced in dialogue later on). Also, and more damagingly, this film wouldn't likely rank in my top 50 examples of casts featuring mostly non-professional actors (bless you Sergi) playing versions of themselves, using their own names—I found none of these people to be very compelling company, and was kinda put off by what seemed like the cheap-seats tactic of having almost all of them be disfigured in some way (though, again, if that's meant to be indicative of time spent in war zones, which didn't occur to me, I formally withdraw the complaint). Even when Sirāt's terrific, that's primarily in ways better executed previously by The Wages of Fear and/or Sorcerer (and I'll throw in Play Dirty, too), though I did appreciate Laxe's panoramic nocturnal shots in which distant trucks' headlights look like fireflies with comet tails. Having bailed on both You All Are Captains and Mimosas, then mostly disliked Fire Will Come, I'm happy to have enjoyed this one as much as I did, but the exhilaration others have felt never happened for me.