“Sirat” by Oliver Laxe: will you be able to enter a trance?
Spanish director Ólivier Laxe takes us to the far reaches of the Moroccan desert, in the wake of freedom-loving ravers. Hypnotic and uncompromising, “Sirat” opens in France on September 10th. At the Cannes Film Festival and in Spain, the film has divided audiences. For the Spanish daily “El País,” this makes it all the more rare and precious.
Susan Sontag said that films rejected by the viewer were generally the most fertile, the only ones that contributed to the progress of cinematic language. Ultimately, argued the American essayist [1933-2004], the general public distrusts the avant-garde, dislikes the modern novel, and hates rationalist architecture. Why should it be any different for atypical cinema?
A truly atypical Spanish film [arrived in June 2025] on our screens. Sirat , the fourth feature film by Galician filmmaker Óliver Laxe [ Mimosas , Fire Will Come ], is produced by El Deseo [the Almodóvar brothers' studio] and won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival . This earned it a small box office success: 54,000 spectators and nearly 400,000 euros in revenue in its first week of release [in mid-August, it was approaching 400,000 spectators in Spain, and it was among the 15 most-watched films since the beginning of the year].
However, one only has to look at social media to see how much the film has been panned by many of its viewers. Professional critics, for their part, consider it a “powerful” spectacle, seeing it as “a desolate response to a present in decline,” a “brilliant exercise in hypnosis,” a sensory journey that “intoxicates you, only to then upset you,” an “anti-system ode,” a “harsh and hypnotic” work of art [phrases borrowed from the Spanish media El País , El Periódico , Eldiario.es , and La Vanguardia ].
On the other hand, a good portion of the public accuses it of "slapping the viewer" with unjustified relentlessness, of being incredibly boring, of committing an offense of "lèse-modernité" and of excessive pretension. Some speak of "deadly boredom," others of "pure aesthetic noise" serving "an eloquent emptiness." Another indicator of a film's ability to annoy its viewers: the percentage of desertions. On social networks, those who are proud to have left the theater during the screening are legion. Some even claim that if they had known how the film ended, they would have left before the beginning.
Nothing new under the sun. Not all the cinema that triumphs at international festivals and arouses critical acclaim can establish complicity with the viewer. Although, for most distributors in our country, a Palme d'Or is the ultimate marketing argument, one thing is certain: Julia Ducournau's film Titane , perhaps the most radical of those recently awarded at Cannes, grossed just 246,000 euros in Spain, from the pockets of 41,000 spectators. A quarter of a million for a film described as "cryptic and complex" (as well as "lustful and wild" ) may seem like a very respectable haul, but it is seventy times less than what the great success of the same year 2021, Spider-Man: No Way Home , achieved.
These figures perhaps shed some light on what is happening to Sirat, on the desertions and the virulence of his detractors. After all, 54,000 spectators in just one weekend is a multitude in a country very reluctant to travel to see a different kind of cinema. The international award, the intense promotional campaign, the charisma of its director and the enthusiasm with which a large part of the critics greeted the film, piqued the curiosity of an audience that very rarely consumes this type of feature film.
In recent years, critics at major festivals have increasingly resorted to a label that had been out of use for decades: the “ cinema of cruelty. ” One of the last to earn it, before this contemporary revival , was the Austrian Michael Haneke , author of such controversial (and cruel) works as Funny Games, Benny's Video, The Piano Teacher, and The Time of the Wolf . In fact, the first to theorize a certain cinema of cruelty was André Bazin [French film critic, co-founder of Cahiers du cinéma (1918-1958)]. For him, directors like Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock , Akira Kurosawa, and Carl Theodor Dreyer were driven by this sadistic impulse, this intellectual misanthropy, this lack of concessions.
Today, the label is too systematically applied to filmmakers from the international circuit of great auteur cinema like Julia Ducournau [whose latest film, Alpha, has been showing in France since August 20], Nicolas Winding Refn, Gaspar Noé, Coralie Fargeat, or to veterans who have retained their aesthetic belligerence, like David Cronenberg or Paul Schrader. Sirat 's Oliver Laxe is currently associated with this cruel wave, perhaps because of the icy and merciless side that his film can have at times. According to even some of his most enthusiastic critics, Laxe refuses all compassion for his characters and treats them with a disembodied lack of empathy.
That said, one could also argue with Sontag, it is the conventional and unconcerned spectator that Laxe's cruelty is addressed to. A spectator settled in his comfort zone, unaccustomed to having his retina and neurons violated, to having his collar handed to him.
Perhaps it is in this aesthetic cruelty, conceived as an antidote to conventional and accommodating cinema, that we must seek the essence and heart of Sirat . This is where Laxe placed them. And in doing so, he took the risk that some of the spectators, not ready to be challenged in this way and to submit to such stimuli (it is their strictest right), would leave the screening well before the end of the film and then rant against his cinema on social networks. In the end, those who reject him are not his audience. They invited themselves into his cinema like accidental tourists, and of course they ended up scalded.
Courrier International is a partner of this film.
