Oliver Laxe’s Restless Wanderers

In Oliver Laxe’s Cannes Jury Prize-winning Sirāt (2025), a caravan of ravers is headed for revelry only to skid deeper into death’s jaws. This bunch of non-conformists defies military clutches, hurtling furthermore towards an abyss. The Moroccan desert stages a chain of events within a missing-person narrative, lurching between shocks of escalating potency. At times, straight lines perforate images, splintering into crooked shapes. The sandy plains glimpse tantalizing possibility, as they seduce all closer to destruction. Any dream of bodily transcendence becomes riddled with mortal terror. Environment, previously liberating, mutates into one spiked with annihilating peril. Having lived in Morocco for twenty years, the French-Spanish-Galician filmmaker finds stillness in the Saharan landscapes, oscillating between the eternal and sensory instant. We feel a deep void lurking at the heart of his films, both luring his characters and keeping them at bay.

Geometrical lines hewing through landscapes converge across the breadth of Laxe’s work. Nature isn’t so much distended from characters as it’s immersed within. There’s natural symmetry with which the empty, expansive settings reveal themselves. Coursing through them are existential, spiritual pangs. They are anchored in questions like how one chucks the past’s burden. How is forgiveness enacted without forgetting all that has preceded? Can transcendence reach a saturation point, once too much trauma has piled up? Across his earlier films, Mimosas (2016) and Fire Will Come (2019), characters wonder about and wander through intense, intimate questions. Laxe chooses evasion instead of spelling these out. It’s left to us how we wish to read the silences. Gestural emphasis overtakes detailed backstories. Everything is written on faces and bodies—at least all that is there to be identified with. In Sirāt, the ravers’ physicality summons the ancient as well as the idea of living outside linear, capitalist time altogether. As they embark for a party, they’re joined by a father searching for his daughter. However, several losses rim the path.

Sirāt strikes as being in direct lineage of Mimosas, which also features a journey. While Sirāt builds with seething tension towards death, the latter sets off with escorting a dying sheikh to his desired place of burial. The convoy of pilgrims is fractured over a shortcut through the majestically intimidating Atlas Mountains, all pernicious cliffs and treacherous terrain. Expeditions across the two films display a similar testing of spirit. A group dissolves in one film, the other huddles together stronger. However, neither can ever be equal nor hold a candle to the surrounding enormity that spurs a metaphysical shift. Faith is a recurring shadow. Should they keep going or turn back? Laxe acts antithetical to audience expectation. Sirāt keeps transubstantiating in genre composition. Though it’s his most accessible outing, he teases warmth before flipping it all in exquisite high-wire scenarios.

Laxe also pitches his characters through a thick veil. Performance is pared down by the units of non-professionals he assembles. He’s favored this since his debut You All Are Captains (2010). The piece on filmmaking punctures encounters between fiction and documentary. Laxe inserts himself as the European artist filming under-privileged children in Tangier. But he is soon rejected by the kids. The film interrupts its own illusion through myriad angles. The effects are profoundly destabilizing. Cinema shows fault lines of its power-inflected construction.

Laxe’s characters essay solitary wanderers, fueled by mysterious design. They are pulled by a logic that pushes back narrative direction. Actions and motivations seem to be in liege of vast, dramatic landscapes cast out all around. In Fire To Come, the protagonist, Amador, is defined by a single act. Despite serving jail time for a suspected act of setting off a forest blaze, Amador struggles to shake off local perception. His crime permanently stains his image. But how guilty is he? No answer can be expected in this film. Amador is framed within constant ambiguity. This can be alternately frustrating and soothingly inviting. What’s the true measure of repentance? Can secrets characters be parsed in mere outlines? How much do we need to know about them to connect?

Laxe trails Amador on his return home. This is a fascinatingly oblique character study—one disinterested in evoking sympathy in spite of its marginalized lead. Laxe shores up reserve and distance between Amador and the viewer. The alleged pyromaniac’s inner life stays inaccessible. Through this, he’s clutching onto dignified privacy, though others don’t pry or clench cynicism. His true intent stays elusive. He politely rejects offers of sharing a drink. He works and works as if its excess can make his past dissipate. We never get close or immediate to his thoughts, anxieties, alarmed realisations. Fire Will Come maps contours of the geography along with the human canvas.

The two are placed in conjunction. Ecological tension limns the film, even as certain people pin blame on others and sharpen their own agenda. But there's no genuine stock-taking of what's felling the Galician countryside. It's this unseen force that swells in the film's opening, baring eventually as tractors razing swathes and swathes of eucalyptus to the ground.

Politics, be it in Sirāt or Fire Will Come, is evoked rather than explained. Geopolitical conflicts sit sideways to the drama. In the former, there are whispers of a third world war, though another character quips it’s been the end of the world for a while. The military closes in, the white ravers are increasingly edged out. Fire Will Come too alludes to Amador caught in the crosshairs of local attitudes. Galicia has seen many forest fires rage. They are a double-edged sword. Being used as resistance to State policies or to clear out dead matter, regional histories of fire complicate Amador’s position.

In a 2020 interview with The Film Stage, Laxe batted for the film’s eschewal of psychological intricacies, “The reasons why we do things in life are not only for psychological reasons. I think we are transcended by energies that transcend ourselves.” We’re oriented towards the sky, brambles, the wind and rain. At most, Laxe singles out Amador’s terse relationship with his mother. Their shared life is driven more by survival than sweet cohabitation. There’s also the suggested spark of romance remaining subdued.

In every film, Laxe hints at a big, ineffable wall characters are up against. It’s an intangible, almost cosmic force they wrestle with. It’s manifest in how nature interacts with and rams against them. In a recent BOMB interview, Laxe stipulated, “I appreciate how nature both cares for and challenges us. Sometimes it does this gently, sometimes it pushes us toward others. I come from a peasant family, and we felt small every day. I think there is a healthy dimension in that: to feel small, to feel finite, is part of being human.”

Laxe pierces into the essence of things and people, whittling out externalized dressage. So, simultaneously, his cinema feels both masked and bared. By turns, our gaze is directed outside human bearings and straight into unmediated consciousness. Laxe’s cinema taps something simple, elemental within—a primal thrust through what knits and serrates man and nature. Be it Sirāt or Mimosas, Laxe empties civilization to a few stranded in the middle of nowhere. Then, the chasm narrows, the few get absorbed back in. Another journey to an unspecified destination begins. A sorcerer of natural images, Laxe can surprise with the intimate and subjective invisibly blending into the wider world.