Oscar 2026: Review of Sirat, The movie that crosses the desert and forgets why

Sirat starts well, better than well. The universe built by Oliver Laxe in the opening minutes is dense, alive, and full of texture. It is the kind of cinema that grabs you by the collar before you even realize you are being held. The Super 16mm photography has a grain that feels like real dirt, real heat, and real danger. The sound design is incredible in the best way: you hear the desert as if you were inside it.

But it is not all sunshine and rainbows, far from it. While the film masterfully builds a grand opening, it eventually chooses to overextend its welcome by trying to be too explosive.

Official Trailer

The film follows a father and son in a desperate search for a daughter and sister who disappeared five months ago in Morocco. The search leads them to an electronic dance party in the desert where, word has it, she might be found. There, they cross paths with an unlikely troupe: queer bodies, people with disabilities, dyed hair, and exaggerated expressions. They represent a whole constellation of dissent gathered in a celebration in the middle of nowhere.

The encounter could have been tense, but it ends up being an alliance. When the Moroccan army arrives to shut down the party, claiming to protect the European people, the two groups flee together from the search line and discover they share the same destiny: there is another party deeper in the desert, and the missing daughter might be there.

What forms from there is not exactly a blood family, but it is a family nonetheless. Father, son, and dissident partygoers all cross a desert together that the radio has already announced as the stage for World War III. Differences are set aside. What unites them is simple and urgent: getting there, surviving, and finding the one who was lost.

It is here, in this build-up, that Sirat shows what it is capable of. The bond between the groups happens organically, without forcing a moral lesson or a speech. The film lets affection emerge naturally from shared danger, and for a good while, this works with a surprising delicacy.

From here on, the article enters spoiler territory. If you have not seen Sirat yet and want to go in blind, save this text for later.

The film reinforces several times, through dialogue and title cards, that the desert is the most dangerous place one could be. The first challenges already show that the partygoers are prepared for the adventure, while the father and son are not. The child in question seems to have skipped the class on how to survive in a geopolitically collapsing desert, and the film exacts that price with a brutality that catches the viewer completely off guard.

The son's death is the film's turning point, as it should be. It is the kind of loss that reorients everything, making the camera, the characters, and the viewer themselves need to breathe differently. In theory, this is where Sirat could deepen what it was building: what remains of the idea of crossing any desert for family when the family starts to disappear?

It is a good question, but it is a question the film decides not to answer. Instead, Sirat decides that grief is less interesting than a minefield, and that is where the trouble begins.

There is a legitimate defense for what Laxe does in the third act. Part of the audience that left the cinema satisfied speaks of radicalism and narrative detachment. They see a cinema that rejects the logic of cause and effect because war rejects it too. The argument exists, and it is not an unintelligent one.

But there is a difference between intentional chaos, the kind that has a purpose and destabilizes to say something, and chaos that is simply abandonment dressed up as boldness. When characters appear in a minefield with zero narrative preparation, when most of them die in a pile-up of misfortunes that feels randomly generated, and when a train appears out of nowhere to save whoever is left, the film is not being radical. It is being negligent.

The train deserves special mention. It was never mentioned and never set up. It appears as a solution to a problem the script itself created, and that has a name: deus ex machina. It is the last resort of a creator who ran out of exits and decided to hope the audience would not notice.

The result is that the third act transforms the film into a narrative every man for himself. This is a curiously cruel message for a story that spent two entire acts building the value of the collective, the shared journey, and the affection that arises in the face of danger.

The lingering feeling is of an incomplete film. This is not in the sense that scenes were missing, but in the sense that it lacked the courage to finish what it started. Sirat has the elements of a powerful work: direction with personality, impeccable technique, and an emotional and political premise that works as long as the script sustains it. The problem is that, at some point in the third act, the script let go of the steering wheel.

The sound design remains, the cinematography remains, and the feeling remains of having seen something that could have been very good but chose to be merely noisy.

I beg the Cannes jury's pardon, because that Palme d'Or clearly needed a footnote to go with it.

Rating: 2 out of 5

What about you? Did you make it through the third act without wanting an emotional refund? Did you find the minefield brilliant or were you also waiting for an explanation that never came? Let us know in the comments!

Until next time!