"Luis (Sergi López) strides into Sirāt looking like an uninvited chaperone at Senior Week. It's not that he's that much older than the crowd of nomadic ravers he's winding his way through, at least one member of which is, like Luis, there with a child. It's that he's just so much squarer, his sensible T-shirt clinging awkwardly to his barrel-like torso, a backpack slung over his shoulder, a concerned expression on his face."
"Sitting through its first half, you develop a reasonable certainty that you know where things are headed according to the established rhythms of movies, so long as you disregard a few insistent discordant notes. Then Laxe pulls the rug out from under his characters - or maybe it's more appropriate to say he lets the ground crumble under their feet."
Sirāt places a sensible Spanish father, Luis, amid a nomadic European rave in southern Morocco as he searches for his adult daughter, Mar, after months of silence. The setting juxtaposes carefree bohemian revelers with grounded familial concern and local observers. The narrative builds expectations in its first half through familiar cinematic rhythms while seeding discordant notes. Gradually the assumed hospitality fractures, and a sudden collapse of safety transforms the gathering into a site of danger. The film uses visual contrasts, uneasy pacing, and a sinkhole metaphor to undermine presumptions of welcome and reveal deeper cultural and emotional fault lines.
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