"The gathering has the vibe of a pilgrimage, the preparations unfolding with quasi-religious grandeur. Several enormous speakers, arranged on a dance floor of sand, have the coldly inanimate majesty of the monoliths in "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), as if they were sonic portals, transmitting pulses from an alien dimension. The music that pours forth, composed by the electronic artist Kangding Ray, is magnificently transporting, and the ravers surrender to the beat with glorious delirium."
"But then, with seemingly on-the-fly artlessness, Laxe's camera picks a few of the dancers out. There is Jade (Jade Oukid), a slender woman with dark-ringed gimlet eyes, a hoop earring, and a bowler hat. And here are Tonin (Tonin Janvier), a man with a warm, crinkly smile and a prosthetic leg, and Bigui (Richard Bellamy), who's missing part of his right forearm and sporting a ratty Mohawk wig. In Laxe's earlier films, most recently the drama "Fire Will Come" (2020), he has worked mainly with nonprofessional actors;"
The film opens in a mountainous stretch of the Sahara where nomadic European ravers gather for an epic, quasi-religious rave staged with enormous speakers like sonic monoliths. Magnificently transporting electronic music propels ecstatic crowds while the camera isolates individuals: Jade, Tonin, and Bigui. The protagonist, Luis (Sergi López), wanders the scene with his young son Esteban and their dog, visibly out of place. Luis’s missing daughter Mar sets a grim, agonizing journey in motion. Most principal players were cast from actual ravers, blending nonprofessional performers with professional acting to examine fate’s cruelty and compassion’s stubborn persistence.
Read at The New Yorker
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