The opening of Oliver Laxe’s Sirat establishes quite the alluring setting, especially for any Australian who has fond memories of attending a good old-fashioned bush doof. We see a wall of speakers being set up one by one, by pairs of hands. They’re dusty and weatherbeaten and some may not work properly, but there’s so much redundancy that it doesn’t matter if any single one has a blown tweeter. When the camera pulls back, we see this impressive edifice set against the even more impressive face of a sheer rock wall, somewhere in the desert.

We find out that “somewhere” is southern Morocco, and the sound is soon going to start booming out at a bunch of desert ravers who have made a pilgrimage to this place, just to ingest the music and as many drugs as their bodies will allow over a 24-hour period. But not everyone is here for that purpose. Luis (Sergi Lopez) is looking for his daughter, “missing” some months now – or just unwilling to tell her dad where she’s gone. He isn’t prepared for the sort of odyssey he’ll undergo in trying to find her.

If a rave in southern Morocco sounds like the best way you can imagine of taking your next walkabout, yeah don’t, maybe. Sirat is not the good kind of trip – unless you are a fan of bracing, confrontational cinema.

The other characters we’ll spend time with are Luis’ son, Esteban (Bruno Nunez Arjona), and a motley collection of ravers in their 40s and 50s who take pity on Luis’ plight, allowing him to follow them in his station wagon to the next desert rave when the first one turns up no daughter. They’re real-life ravers playing themselves: Stefania Gadda, Joshua Liam Henderson, Richard “Bigui” Bellamy, Tonin Janvier and Jade Oukid. Their preferred language to converse with each other is French, but they can switch to Spanish to help out Luis and Esteban.

The ravers are piloting two larger vehicles that are much more equipped for the desert terrain. They do warn Luis that following them is not a good idea, but Luis is determined, even with dubious sources of petrol and water, and rocky surfaces that are completely unpredictable because they weren’t designed for passage by motor vehicles.

One look at these characters and we get the sense of what Luis is trying to avoid for his own daughter. They’re not bad people; in fact, they might be quite generous. But life has clearly taken pieces out of them — literally. One is missing a leg from the knee down. Another is missing a hand. Yes it’s possible that disease or some other bit of very bad luck has resulted in the loss of these limbs, but you get the greater sense that the culprit was misadventure.

If “adventure” is a genre for films like Raiders of the Lost Ark, “misadventure” might be an appropriate genre for Sirat, which has been nominated for best international feature at next month’s Academy Awards. Laxe isn’t for a moment judging the choices of these characters, or at least not the choices of his aged ravers, though the fact that none of them is in their 20s is notable. You get the sense he wouldn’t have chosen this milieu if he didn’t come out of this scene in some way himself.

But there are horrors in store in Sirat – avoidable horrors, and horrors in the truest sense of that word. To reveal anything about their nature would betray the sense of shock the film relies on for its impact, though to refer to them as “gut punches” gives you some idea what we’re talking about.

The electronic score by Kangding Ray drenches Sirat in its sense of foreboding. There’s a relentless quality to all EDM music, one that is very much in the eye, or rather the ear, of the beholder. A person who has loved these nights of his or her youth will get joy, even a sense of nostalgia, from what are driving, bass-intensive, at times sinister sounds. Anyone who’s had a night like that go off the rails may get the sense of foreboding earlier than the rest of us do.

And Laxe has got a great eye for presenting this descent into the unknown. Half the work is done by the setting – the film was shot in Morocco, with some scenes in Spain – but Laxe knows just how to film that setting. One particular image of the vehicles pressing through the desert night shot from a thousand feet up, only their headlights illuminating the landscape, lingers in the memory.

Even though the aforementioned horrors will unfold, there isn’t any sense that Laxe is making Sirat for purely masochistic reasons. Without putting any sort of fine point on it, Laxe is showing us human beings who look out for each other and grasp to hope in the face of very long odds, and in that sense there is also an optimism embedded in it. They defy our snap judgments of them at every turn. Perhaps there are worse things than for Luis’ daughter to follow these people on their path in life, as long as she can keep all of her arms and legs.

 

Sirat opens today in Australian cinemas.