Sirat (2025) [Blu-ray Review]

Every so often a film arrives that does not so much tell a story as drag you bodily through an experience, and Sirat is the most intense example I have encountered in a long while. Óliver Laxe’s Spanish-French odyssey, which won the Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and went on to a remarkable awards run including an Academy Award nomination, follows a father searching for his missing daughter among the ravers of the Moroccan desert, and it builds to a place few films dare to go. Now Neon brings Sirat home on Blu-ray, and the disc is available at MovieZyng. For adventurous collectors, this is one of the most singular releases of the year. For everyone else, consider this your warning that Sirat is not a film you put on lightly.

The Quick Take

The verdict: Sirat is a staggering, brutal, spiritually charged work of art, a desert road movie that mutates into something far darker, anchored by Sergi López and powered by one of the most physically overwhelming sound designs in modern cinema. Neon’s Blu-ray is a strong presentation, and the audio in particular is a reference-grade showcase, though it arrives as a manufactured-on-demand BD-R rather than a pressed disc.

Category	Score
The Film	88 / 100
HD Video	88 / 100
Audio	92 / 100
Special Features	80 / 100
Overall Disc	87 / 100

Bottom line: Buy it if you crave bold, demanding arthouse cinema and want a sound system workout unlike anything else this year. Available now on Blu-ray from MovieZyng. Best for: Adventurous cinephiles, fans of Cannes and international film, lovers of immersive sound design, and anyone chasing the year’s most unforgettable big-screen experience at home. One caveat: Sirat is genuinely punishing, with a midpoint turn into shocking violence and despair. It is a masterpiece for the right viewer and an ordeal for the wrong one. Format reviewed: Blu-ray, BD-R manufactured on demand (Neon) | 115 minutes | Not Rated | Released May 19, 2026.

A Father, a Son, and a Rave at the Edge of the World

Sirat opens with an image and a sound that announce immediately you are in for something unusual. In the Moroccan desert, a crew of weathered, sunburned ravers assembles an enormous wall of speakers, and when the music starts, it does not so much play as physically occupy the space. This is no joyful youth-culture party. The crowd moves to a metronomic, pagan, bass-saturated beat like the dancing dead, and Laxe’s patient camera simply observes the ritual. It is hypnotic and faintly menacing, and it sets the spiritual frequency for everything that follows in Sirat.

Into this scene walks Luis, played by the great Catalan actor Sergi López, with his young son Esteban at his side. They are handing out flyers bearing the face of Mar, Luis’s daughter and Esteban’s sister, who vanished at one of these endless desert raves some five months earlier. Hope is fading, but Luis cannot stop searching, and when the ravers pack up to caravan toward one last party deep in the wilderness, father and son follow them, clinging to the slim chance that Mar might be there. So begins the road movie at the heart of Sirat, a journey across the Atlas Mountains and into an increasingly hostile landscape, undertaken by a man who can no longer tell the difference between a search and an obsession.

For its first stretch, Sirat plays as a strange, beautiful travelogue, a study of these misfit nomads and the unforgiving terrain they cross, with Luis and Esteban as outsiders slowly absorbed into the group. The dialogue is sparse, the silences are heavy, and Laxe trusts landscape, gesture, and that overpowering sound to carry the meaning. But anyone who knows Laxe’s work, or who caught the ominous reports of an outside world sliding toward war that flicker at the edges of the film, will sense that Sirat is building toward something. The desert is not just a setting. It is a threshold, and the film is daring you to cross it.

The Bridge Between Heaven and Hell

To understand what Sirat is really doing, it helps to know what the title means, because Laxe chose it with great care. In Islamic tradition, the Sirat is the bridge stretched over hell that every soul must cross to reach paradise, a passage where each person is confronted with the true nature of their life. That image is the key to the entire film. Sirat is not ultimately a missing-person thriller, though it wears that costume for a while. It is a metaphysical journey, a passage across a threshold between worlds, and the desert road that Luis travels is the bridge itself.

Laxe has built his career on exactly this kind of mystical, contemplative cinema, and Sirat is the boldest expression of his sensibility yet. Where his earlier films like Mimosas and Fire Will Come explored faith and the uncontrollable forces of nature with a quiet, meditative patience, Sirat takes those preoccupations and runs them through a far more punishing engine. The film is concerned with faith, loss, and redemption, with what we are willing to endure for the people we love, and with the thin and porous boundary between the living and the dead. Several critics at Cannes noted that the protagonists of Sirat might be understood as already dead from the very start, souls making their crossing, and the film supports that reading without ever spelling it out. This is cinema operating on a spiritual register, demanding that you meet it on those terms.

That ambition is also why Sirat is so divisive, and so rewarding for the viewers it does reach. It is not interested in tidy resolution or conventional catharsis. It wants to put you through a passage and see what is left of you on the other side. The film has been compared to the apocalyptic art cinema of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and the kinetic dread of Mad Max: Fury Road, and that strange hybrid of meditative European auteurism and visceral action is exactly what makes Sirat unlike anything else. It is a religious experience disguised as a road movie, and the disc is the best way to take that journey at home.

Sergi López Walks Into the Fire

The emotional anchor of Sirat is Sergi López, an actor many will recognize as the monstrous Captain Vidal from Pan’s Labyrinth, here doing something almost entirely interior. Luis is a man stripped down to a single, consuming purpose, and López plays him with a weary, stubborn devotion that never tips into sentimentality. He says relatively little. The performance lives in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders, in the way he keeps moving forward long after a reasonable man would have turned back. It is a portrait of grief as a kind of momentum, a refusal to stop that has become indistinguishable from the man himself, and López carries the entire spiritual weight of Sirat on that foundation.

What makes the casting so effective is the contrast Laxe builds around López. The director surrounded his professional lead with a cast of largely non-professional actors playing the ravers, real faces with what one critic called pungent, genuine vibes, and that mix of the trained and the untrained gives Sirat its documentary texture and its unpredictability. Bruno Núñez Arjona, as the son Esteban, is especially affecting, a child drawn into an adult ordeal he only partly understands, and the ravers played by Jade Oukid, Tonin Janvier, Richard Bellamy, Stefania Gadda, and the others feel like genuine inhabitants of this scorched world rather than actors visiting it. The ensemble of Sirat is one of its quiet triumphs, grounding the film’s metaphysical reach in bodies that look like they have actually lived in the desert.

It is worth noting the heavyweight backing behind this fiercely uncommercial film, because it speaks to the regard in which Laxe is held. Sirat was produced in part by El Deseo, the company run by Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar, which lent the project both prestige and the muscle to mount such a logistically punishing desert shoot. That a film this radical and demanding attracted producers of that stature, and went on to become a genuine box-office success in Spain while collecting awards across Europe, is a reminder that uncompromising art cinema can still find both support and an audience when the vision is strong enough.

I will not detail where the performances go in the back half of Sirat, because the film’s power depends on not knowing, but I will say that López and his castmates are asked to play scenes of almost unbearable intensity, and they meet the demand. This is committed, fearless acting in service of a film that gives its cast nowhere to hide.

Óliver Laxe, Tarkovsky’s Desert Heir

Behind the camera, Sirat confirms Óliver Laxe as one of the most distinctive voices in European cinema, an artist frequently and not unreasonably described as an heir to Andrei Tarkovsky for his patient, spiritual, landscape-driven approach. With Sirat, Laxe and his collaborators have made a film of overwhelming sensory craft, and the awards it accumulated reflect that. The cinematography by Mauro Herce, which won the European Film Award in its category, renders the Moroccan desert as a place of terrible beauty, all blinding sun, blowing dust, and vast indifferent emptiness, and the Blu-ray showcases those images strikingly. Herce shoots the landscape as a living, uncontrollable force, dwarfing the human figures who dare to cross it, and his work is central to the spiritual scale of Sirat.

Equally essential is the editing by Cristóbal Fernández, also an award winner, which controls the film’s gradual, dreadful tightening of tension with remarkable precision. And then there is the music. The score by the electronic musician Kangding Ray, the project name of David Letellier, won the Cannes Soundtrack Award, earned a Golden Globe nomination, and is genuinely one of the most important elements of the entire film. Laxe sought out Kangding Ray specifically for his textural, atmospheric approach, asking him to compose something more cinematic, ambient, and spiritual than pure techno, and the result is a soundscape that functions less as accompaniment than as a physical presence. The sub-bass in Sirat does not just play. It rumbles in your gut like an approaching earthquake, and it is the engine of the film’s hypnotic, overwhelming power. We will return to how that translates to the disc, because it is the audio highlight of the year.

When the Bass Drops, So Does the Floor

Here is where I have to discuss, carefully and without spoilers, the thing that makes Sirat so unforgettable and so difficult. For its first stretch, the film lulls you into the rhythm of the road, the music, the landscape, the slow absorption of Luis and Esteban into the caravan. And then, at a certain point, Sirat detonates. The film executes a midpoint turn so sudden, so shocking, and so brutal that the audience at my screening audibly recoiled, and from that moment on Sirat becomes a different and far more harrowing film than the one you thought you were watching.

I will say only that the threat of death in Sirat, which hovers abstractly over the early scenes, becomes horrifyingly literal, and that the film does not flinch from the consequences. Laxe stages this turn not as cheap shock but as the moment the metaphysical premise becomes physical reality, the point at which the bridge over hell reveals what crossing it actually costs. It is a bold, almost reckless gambit, the kind of swing that loses some viewers entirely and converts others into evangelists, and it is the reason Sirat has been one of the most fervently debated films of its year. The control Laxe exercises over suspense and dread in the back half is masterful, and the sense of mounting catastrophe, scored by that earth-shaking music, is genuinely overwhelming. This is filmmaking with no safety net, and whether you find it profound or punishing, you will not forget it.

Is Sirat Too Punishing to Own?

Let me address the real question for a prospective buyer, because Sirat is not a casual purchase. Is this a film you will want to revisit, and is it worth owning on disc when watching it even once is an ordeal? It is a fair concern. Sirat is bleak, intense, and emotionally devastating, the kind of film that leaves you wrung out, and I have seen thoughtful viewers say they admired it enormously and never want to experience it again.

Here is my honest take. Sirat rewards ownership precisely because it is so much more than its shocks. On a first viewing you are blindsided by the narrative turns and the brutality, bracing for the next blow. On a second viewing, freed from the suspense, you can attend to what the film is actually doing: the extraordinary craft of Herce’s images, the spiritual architecture of the story, the way every element builds toward its metaphysical meaning. And crucially, Sirat is an experiential film, one whose power lives in image and especially sound, which means a proper home presentation with a good system gets you closer to the overwhelming theatrical experience than streaming ever could. This is exactly the kind of film physical media exists to serve. It is demanding, it is not for everyone, and I would never push it on a viewer looking for comfort. But for those willing to make the crossing, Sirat is a profound and singular work, and owning it on Blu-ray is the best way to take the journey again, and to share it with the few friends brave enough to follow you into the desert.

Film and Disc Specifications

Detail	Information
Film Title	Sirat
Year	2025
Director	Óliver Laxe
Screenplay	Óliver Laxe, Santiago Fillol
Produced by	Pedro Almodóvar, Agustín Almodóvar, Esther García, Óliver Laxe, Oriol Maymó, and others
Cast	Sergi López, Bruno Núñez Arjona, Jade Oukid, Tonin Janvier, Richard Bellamy, Stefania Gadda, Joshua Liam Henderson
Cinematography	Mauro Herce
Music	Kangding Ray (David Letellier)
Editing	Cristóbal Fernández
Production Companies	El Deseo, Filmes da Ermida, Uri Films, 4A4 Productions, Movistar Plus+
Countries	Spain, France
Languages	Spanish, French
US Distributor	Neon
Runtime	115 minutes
Rating	Not Rated
Disc Format	Blu-ray (BD-R, manufactured on demand)
Aspect Ratio	Widescreen
Video	1080p HD
Audio	DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (to be confirmed)
Subtitles	English
Release Date	May 19, 2026 (Digital March 24, 2026)
Distributor	Neon

Special Features:

Feature	Details
Sirat and Oliver Laxe	Featurette with the director
Sergi López as Luis	Featurette on the lead performance
Bruno Núñez Arjona as Esteban	Featurette on the young co-star
The Actor’s Work	Featurette on the cast’s process
The Invisible Family	Behind-the-scenes featurette
Electric Matter	Featurette on the film’s music and sound
Teaser	Original teaser
Trailer	Theatrical trailer

Sand, Sun, and Sweat in HD: The Video

The 1080p presentation of Sirat does real justice to Mauro Herce’s award-winning cinematography, and for a film this rooted in landscape, that matters enormously. Presented in widescreen, the Blu-ray captures the harsh, sun-scorched beauty of the Moroccan desert with impressive clarity, and the disc lets you appreciate why Herce’s work was singled out for the European Film Award. This is a film of vast, punishing vistas and intimate, dust-caked faces, and the high-definition image renders both with strength.

In practical terms, the transfer handles the film’s challenging conditions well. The blinding desert daylight, the deep shadows of night-time rave scenes lit by little more than the glow of equipment, the textures of sand, sweat, and weathered skin, all of it comes through with solid detail and natural color. Black levels in the darker sequences hold up, preserving the eerie atmosphere of the nocturnal gatherings, and the daytime scenes have the kind of oppressive, radiant brightness that makes you feel the heat. The one note of caution worth flagging is the format. This Neon release is a manufactured-on-demand BD-R rather than a traditional pressed Blu-ray, which means it will play in nearly all current Blu-ray players with updated firmware but is not guaranteed on every device, and BD-R encodes can occasionally run at slightly lower bitrates than pressed discs. In this case, the image holds up well and serves the film admirably, but collectors who prefer pressed media should know what they are buying. As a presentation of Sirat, it looks very good, and it is a substantial step up from any streaming compression.

Feel the Sub-Bass: The Audio

If the video is strong, the audio is the reason this disc demands a place in a serious collection, because Sirat may be the single best argument for a quality sound system that home video has produced this year. The film’s overpowering, bass-heavy soundscape is not a backdrop. It is the primary delivery system for the film’s dread, euphoria, and terror, and Kangding Ray’s Cannes-winning score was designed to be felt in the body as much as heard. On a properly configured system, the Blu-ray of Sirat delivers exactly that.

The low-frequency content here is genuinely extraordinary. The metronomic techno of the rave sequences produces a sub-bass that rumbles like a seismic event, and the disc reproduces it with a physical force that few mixes ever attempt. This is the rare arthouse film that doubles as a demo disc, the kind of thing you use to show a friend what your subwoofer can actually do, except that in Sirat the bass is not spectacle for its own sake but the film’s spiritual engine, the pulse of its journey across the threshold. Beyond the music, the sound design renders the desert environment with immersive precision, the wind, the engines, the unsettling quiet between beats, all placed with care across the soundstage. Dialogue, sparse as it is, remains clear, and the English subtitles handle the Spanish and French throughout. Assuming the lossless track on this release matches the film’s theatrical mix, and the presentation strongly suggests it does, this is reference-grade audio in service of a film where sound is everything. It is the highlight of the disc and a major part of the recommendation.

From the Vaults: The Special Features

For a boutique release of a challenging international film, the supplemental package on Sirat is genuinely generous, and it is a pleasant surprise. Rather than the bare-bones trailer-and-nothing-else treatment that so many arthouse discs receive, Neon has assembled a robust slate of featurettes that dig into the film’s creation from multiple angles, which is exactly what a work this dense and intentional invites.

The centerpiece is a featurette built around director Óliver Laxe, offering insight into his vision and his singular, mystical approach to filmmaking, which is invaluable for a film as open to interpretation as Sirat. From there, the disc offers focused pieces on the performances, with Sergi López as Luis and Bruno Núñez Arjona as Esteban each getting their own spotlight, plus a broader featurette called The Actor’s Work that explores how Laxe drew performances from his mix of professional and non-professional cast. The Invisible Family takes you behind the scenes of the production, and most intriguingly, a featurette titled Electric Matter delves into the film’s all-important music and sound, the element that more than any other defines the experience of Sirat. Rounding out the package are the teaser and the theatrical trailer. That is a thoughtful and substantial collection that treats Sirat with the seriousness it deserves, and it meaningfully enhances the value of the release. The only thing missing for the most devoted is a feature-length commentary, but as boutique slates go, this one is well above average.

Should You Buy Sirat on Blu-ray? The Final Word

Sirat is a major film, one of the boldest and most uncompromising works of its year, and its journey from the Cannes Jury Prize to an Academy Award nomination has been thoroughly earned. It is a spiritual road movie that becomes an apocalyptic ordeal, a meditation on grief, faith, and the bridge between worlds, anchored by a quietly devastating Sergi López and elevated by some of the most extraordinary cinematography and sound design in recent memory. It is not an easy watch, and it is not trying to be. But for viewers willing to make the crossing, Sirat is a profound, unforgettable experience, the kind of film that reminds you what cinema is capable of when an artist refuses to compromise.

Neon’s Blu-ray serves the film well. The picture is strong, the generous featurettes do justice to the film’s craft, and the audio is a reference-grade showcase that turns Sirat into one of the most physically immersive discs you can own. The manufactured-on-demand BD-R format is the one caveat for collectors who prefer pressed media, and the absence of a commentary leaves a little on the table, but neither diminishes what is on offer. If you have any appetite for daring, demanding, sensory cinema, Sirat belongs in your collection, and it is the best way to experience this remarkable film outside a theater. You can pick it up on Blu-ray now at MovieZyng. Just turn up the volume, and brace yourself.

Sirat (Neon) | Not Rated | 115 minutes | Released May 19, 2026