Sirāt (2025) review

Concerned father Luis (Sergi López), who is accompanied by his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), winds up at an outdoor rave in Morocco where he's trying to find his missing daughter, but then the military rolls in to evacuate everyone because a war has broken out and Luis and Esteban follow a pack of nomadic outcasts (who prove to be quite kind) through treacherous terrain.  It shouldn't take long for film fans to recognize that Clouzot's 1953 masterpiece The Wages of Fear is the primary influence here, although director Laxe puts his own spin on it by shooting around desolate (albeit pretty) landscapes and using hard-thumping techno music for his soundtrack.  The movie is very deliberately paced, except the main issue is it's so intent on shocking the audience with surprise deaths - and there is a key one that will startle many viewers (including myself) - that it becomes too nihilistic for my taste, and it's not like the script is the most complex to lend it a 'richer meaning.'  With a slight shift in tone, the final twenty minutes could have come out of a Quentin Dupieux feature.