What if Óliver Laxe’s Sirât were a fable about climate change — a vision of humanity’s final hours?
The fourth feature by Franco-Spanish filmmaker Óliver Laxe has already sparked endless debate since its explosive premiere on the Croisette last May, where it walked away with the Jury Prize ex aequo. Sirât stands out, disturbs, disorients. It plunges us into another world—perhaps an inner one—an experience at once ethereal and abrasive, surprising and indelibly haunting, unfolding through imagery largely unseen in cinema.
On the occasion of the film’s Quebec premiere at the 31st edition of CINEMANIA, I wish to share an interpretation that emerged while watching it—one among many possible readings, for Sirât seems deliberately open to multiple interpretations.
To me, Sirât evokes the extinction of humanity, the consequence of an irreversible climatic disruption that renders our world increasingly uninhabitable. At its core are individuals whose bodies are scarred, mutilated, emaciated—damaged bodies, reawakened only by LSD and music in a techno dance bordering on trance: a kind of final spasm, the convulsions of bodies on the verge of death. A rhythmic, repetitive, minimalist dance, echoing the pulse of an electrocardiogram—the last mechanical flickers of life within these beings.
All unfolds within an environment of extreme aridity—the most inhospitable, the least fit for life. A dead nature that signals Sirât as already taking place at humanity’s edge, in the antechamber of its end, of death itself. We are with wounded beings, brushing up against that ultimate frontier.
In this setting, where the viewer is first awkwardly introduced, held at a distance by an extradiegetic soundtrack that prevents full immersion in the opening rave, Óliver Laxe gradually draws us in, viscerally, until the very end. He unfolds imagery that is rare, if not unique. Some shots will likely become iconic—such as those of vehicles speeding through the pitch-black night, headlights piercing both the desert and the inner depths of the characters.
Then, as an allegory of the consequences of climate catastrophe, some characters are struck down, others spared—without logic, without justice. Victims of climate change accumulate, and our habitable world shrinks inexorably. The ground on which these characters can set foot narrows with each step. Every livable space becomes rarer, more fragile.
Until it becomes a kind of Noah’s Ark on rails, crossing a mined desert: an ultimate refuge, and a metaphor for the forced migrations undertaken to survive—barely.
And finally, in these last moments of humanity, faced with extinction, only one thing remains: solidarity. That of a father who, at first reluctant to share his provisions with his companions, ultimately gives in. Mutual aid, sharing, care for one another—symbolized, among other things, by that bottle of water passed from hand to hand in one of the film’s final shots.
This interpretation is, no doubt, just one among many. Above all, it attests to the power and evocative force of the tour de force accomplished by Óliver Laxe—an achievement that has unquestionably marked the cinematic year.
