Tags: blog, film, thriller, recommended, 2026
Author: KickingK
Date: Monday April 06th, 2026
Is this what the end of the world feels like?
Sirat is a movie that doesn't give a toss about your feelings. Doesn't care for your sense of closure or your need for justice. Doesn't care about your sense of aesthetics or beauty or empathy. It's actively hostile to you taking anything of value from the film and seemingly ambivalent if you even watch it past a certain point. It's technique for building tension is to simply hit you out of nowhere with an iron bar. It hurts and it works.
The desert of Morocco in which it's filmed is as imposing and hostile as the films attitude. Monolithic, brutal and utterly unconcerned with the triviality of human life.
The music matches it right from the start. Slow moving, bass driven techno wobbles the very dust and vibrates through everything but the rock. As one character points out, "You don't listen to it, you dance to it".
It's tempting to say that there's not a film like this, but there is one. The debt this owes to William Friedkin's masterpiece Sorcerer is so great that if Friedkin was still alive he'd send the bailiffs round. It shares the same sense of nihilism. It also has the same sense of timing where the moment where you just want to beg the characters to turn back and give up is the exact same moment that they've gone too far to do so.
If you are going to watch this then you're just going to have to suffer like everyone else.
Stunning.
