Enjoy a twisting ride in 'Sirat'

Oliver Laxe's road thriller about the search for a girl won the Cannes Jury Prize.

- AMY NICHOLSON

OLIVER LAXE'S film follows a caravan of resourceful misfits-many played by nonprofessional actors-as they hit the road after soldiers break up a desert rave.

Festival de Cannes

The second time I saw the road thriller "Sirat," I couldn't wait to hear the audience moan.

Months earlier, I'd stumbled dazed out of its Cannes premiere already excited to see it again with a crowd and when I finally did, those moans came earlier, a hint that some folks had been tipped off to steel themselves. That's all I'll give away about the sharp turns in Spain's punkish, prankish and strangely existential Oscar submission (which already won Cannes' Jury Prize). Seeing it blank would be best, but it's my job to poke you to go.

"Sirat" is by the filmmaker Oliver Laxe, an intense bohemian who would blend in at the rave in Morocco where his hypnotic film begins. In this stretch of dramatic desert flanked by the Atlas Mountains, men assemble stacks of speakers - a wall to keep a horde of Western invaders in. Electronic music starts to thump, rubbery pulsars bouncing over a steady beat.

These bleeps sound alive and then suddenly, there is life: hundreds of pleasureseekers stomping in the sand as laser beams outline alien towers over these orange cliffs.

This isn't a Coachella or Burning Man crowd. People go to the former to be seen, the latter to build and explore. Those are vacations.

"Sirat's" bacchanal is for permanent burnouts who've lost themselves at the intersection of transcendence and oblivion. Most of these folks are so far gone, so permanently scarred with body modifications, that there's no coming back to so-called polite society. There's only this song and the next one, and a guess of where the party might head next.