“It’s been the end of the world for a long time.”

How do we continue to seek & experience pleasure while the world is actively ending all around us? I have no idea if that question was on director Oliver Laxe’s while he was making the new apocalyptic rave-scene drama Sirāt, but it was certainly on mine while watching it. In fact, it’s getting increasingly difficult to think about anything else these days, when simple, for their-own-sake pleasures are feeling less attainable and more amoral by the minute. The transient partiers of Sirāt have to selectively tune out constant news reportage about the start of World War III in order to enjoy their daily travels & pleasure hunts, stubbornly continuing their journey to the next big party on the horizon despite what the audience can only assume is an impending nuclear holocaust. From a distance, it may seem excessively selfish or hedonistic for them to continue raving on while the world is ending just outside their periphery, but it’s also difficult to imagine what a small crew of recreational drug users & dance music enthusiasts could possibly do to stop that apocalyptic momentum anyway, even if they were more politically engaged with the world outside their vans. The only two options they have, really, are to either helplessly fret their final hours away or to fill those hours with as many small, for-their-own sake pleasures as they can manage. In the immortal words of Andrew W.K., “When it’s time to party [i.e, to distract ourselves from impending doom and the ever-present desire to cry until we puke], we will always party hard.” Words to live by, I guess.

I do not want to imply that Sirāt‘s entire cast of characters is evaporated into a mushroom cloud at the story’s climax. WWIII is more of a background hum beneath their constant soundtrack of techno beats than it is a direct threat on their lives. If they are in any mortal danger, it’s due to their personal choices, not global circumstances. The film opens in the vastness of the Moroccan desert, with unnamed party promoters erecting enormous speaker towers in the sand like Kubrick’s monolith. When thunderous bass starts pumping through those speakers, a crowd of ravers materialize to party the hours away, dancing up a dust cloud to a nonstop techno track. The only interlopers among them are a middle aged, working-class dad (Sergi López) and his young son, who pass out “Missing Person” flyers in an attempt to track down a member of their family who hasn’t returned home in a half-year’s time. When military troops breaks up the party, the out-of-place father & son duo decide to follow the biggest risk-taker ravers to a second rave even deeper in the desert, risking their lives for the possibility of staging a family reunion. Meanwhile, the more hardcore ravers are risking their lives for the pure thrill of the risk. As the makeshift convoy journeys towards the Promised Land rave deeper in the desert, the film starts hitting thriller genre beats more reminiscent of a Sorcerer or a Fury Road than the small character drama beats it hits in the opening stretch. Shit gets real. People get hurt. And yet, their lives still feel small & inconsequential within the context of the larger global catastrophe being set in motion just outside the frame.

Despite the lethal stakes of Sirāt‘s scene-to-scene drama and apocalyptic setting, the movie can be oddly sweet. It’s a character drama at heart, one populated by real, believable people with real-life faces of interest — as opposed to the perfectly sculpted plastic faces of its Hollywood studio equivalents. The European ravers each speak multiple languages; they gradually assimilate the misguided father & son into their own found family; and they wax poetic about the simple joys of taking drugs to techno music, explaining to the befuddled, “It’s not for listening; it’s for dancing.” The fact that tragic things happen to them on the road (and that their world is doomed regardless) is an inevitability beyond their control. All they can do is party in the present and hope to survive long enough to party again in the future, often with open disdain for reminiscing about the past. The up-close details of their lifestyle are entirely alien to me, as I neither take the right drugs nor listen to the right music to fit into the raver scene they inhabit. Their collective impulse to seek small sensory pleasures in a world that’s actively collapsing around them should resonate with anyone who’s had the misfortune of being alive & aware this century, though, regardless of the futility in their pursuit. Not for nothing, their search for the next big party in the Moroccan wilderness is also strangely reminiscent of how I dream, when my unconscious mind is constantly sorting through a chaotic assemblage of fictional, self-generated obstacles while I’m trying to make my way to a dreamworld concert, party, or film screening that doesn’t actually exist.

-Brandon Ledet