Whatever the results of the awards circuit, critics were more or less unanimous in pronouncing Sirāt to be the best film of last year. Freely shifting between Spanish, French, Arabic and English, this film defies genre expectations and has been described both as a road trip drama and science-fiction. To me, it is one thing above all, as pure a religious experience as you can achieve on film, without being explicitly about any religion in particular. It’s a stroke of genius on the part of its director Óliver Laxe to interpret the rave scene in this manner and I would agree that it’s the most outstanding film of 2025.

Deep in the deserts of Morocco, ravers set up banks of giant speakers to party. Among them are Luis, along with his young son Esteban and their dog Pipa. Luis is searching for his daughter Mar, a raver who has not returned home in months. They sleep in their van and pass out leaflets to ask everyone if they have seen her. One group of ravers tell him that there will be another rave event farther to the south and suggests searching there. The next day soldiers arrive to forcibly break up the event and order the ravers to evacuate. The earlier group of ravers suddenly break away in their two vehicles and Luis follows them in his van. On the radio they hear news that war has broken out and a global crisis seems to be formenting. When they stop, the ravers try to dissuade Luis from following them, saying that his van will never be able to make the trip but he persists. They seem to accept him when they run of money trying to buy fuel and Luis pays for them. After they spot a convoy of military vehicles on the main road, they decide to take to the mountains, sharing their food and fuel, and draw closer together.

Visually and sonically, this is a delight. The sight of bodies losing themselves to the music, crawling all over the speakers to get closer to the music, vehicles passing through the mountains and the deserts, their headlights cutting through the deep darkness as if they were spacecraft, the bass-heavy pulse-pounding beat serving as the soundtrack to their journey. Outside the world shifts and the news drones on about World War III and the possible end of the world. But the insides of the vehicles are cozy nests of joy as if they were an extended family and nothing else matters. That alone would be enough to make Sirāt an incredible feast for the senses but then comes the twist which I won’t spoil here. I will say that I remember when I have been more shocked by a film. The event completely alters the trajectory I had been expecting but it does perfectly contextualize what it is really about and elevates it to true greatness.

Not that what it’s about is much of a mystery. Early on, one of the ravers Jade glances at a television screen showing the Haj being performed at Mecca. Thereafter the chanting of the prayers is incorporated into the soundtrack. The message is obvious. The group is on a pilgramage of their own whether it’s Luis’ search for his daughter or the ravers traveling from one rave to the next. There are clear analogies throughout of Biblical stories, going out into the desert, sacrifice and so on. As the trip continues, the more it feels that they are cut off from the world at large, that they have entered their own separate reality. In that liminal space, they are forced to surrender their selves, either to a higher power or the universe itself. Again, I’m an atheist but I’m still a sucker for films that effectively invoke a sense of the divine. This is definitely the case here and it’s hard to imagine anyone being able to walk out of this unmoved by the experience.

Reading up on the project, I’m fascinated that original conceit amounted to nothing more than trucks crossing the desert. Whether by design, luck or stroke of genius, tacking rave culture onto it with a quasi-religious spin makes all the difference. This film has it all, being audiovisually striking, conceptually unique and unrelenting in its capacity to surprise and shock. I haven’t seen every significant film that was released last year yet but this is my current front-runner for that year’s best as well.