[SPOILERS] The Same Vibration Can Be Pleasure or Destruction — Thinking Through SIRAT After Watching
![[SPOILERS] The Same Vibration Can Be Pleasure or Destruction — Thinking Through SIRAT After Watching](/en/note/sirat-after-watching/graph.png)
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Warning
This article contains full spoilers for SIRAT, including the film's ending and its depictions of violence and death by landmine.
Many people, apparently, could not stand up immediately when the film ended.
What happened was clear enough. What had been experienced was not. You leave the theater in that condition, and then, gradually, words begin to gather. This is an attempt at that gathering.
Why Luis Is Designed to Be an Outsider
The film begins as the story of a father, Luis, and his son Esteban searching for a daughter and sister who has disappeared.
Luis comes from outside the rave. He does not know what the music means. He does not carry the physical memory that the people on the floor carry. He is there for one reason only: to bring his daughter back.
This setup is not a simple story of an adult who does not understand. Structurally, Luis occupies the same position as a portion of the audience. A person who has never been to a rave, thrown into the center of a desert party, experiencing the disorientation, the sense of exclusion, the obligation to remain.
Sergi López, who plays Luis, is a professional actor. Many of the people on the floor around him are not. Real rave participants are dancing and existing inside a situation called a film shoot. That contrast registers on screen. Luis's body alone floats in that space.
This floating is the film's entry point.
When the Outside World Enters the Temporary Autonomous Zone
The desert rave functions as a Temporary Autonomous Zone in Hakim Bey's sense.
In a desert beyond the reach of state management, strangers gather around a sound system and dance. The moving community has no fixed address and drives toward the next location. It is a form of freedom that stands up temporarily outside administered society.
But that freedom is not complete.
There are landmines in the desert.
The landmine is a residue of past wars and a fact of present geopolitics. The desert is not an empty wilderness but a place where history and politics have accumulated. The questions of Morocco and Western Sahara, the traces of colonial authority, the violence of borders — the film does not explain these. But through the object of the landmine, it delivers to the audience's body what is buried under the sand.
Dancing and explosion happen on the same ground.
A Kick Drum and a Landmine Are the Same Vibration
The core of this film is a physical fact.
The low-end sound of a kick drum is a vibration in air. It reaches your body through the eardrum and through bone conduction, and it moves you. The feeling of being "taken over" by music on a rave floor is not only neural pleasure — it is also the literal physics of vibration moving flesh.
An explosion is also a vibration. A shockwave travels through air and ground and moves the body that is there. The two share the same physical mechanism.
SIRAT does not sever this continuity.
Within the film, the vibration of music and the vibration of explosion are not delivered as clearly distinct sensations. The "boom" received as pleasure transforms into a "boom" of destruction — or the whole duration of the film becomes a time of anticipating that transformation while having no choice but to go on dancing.
The sound design maintains this ambiguity deliberately. Both vibrations are real. Both reach the body.
Why Kanding Ray's Music Becomes More Than Music
Kanding Ray, the French electronic musician who composed the film's score, also DJs the rave scenes in the film itself.
This is not conventional film scoring. The sounds he creates function as the actual rave music that moves the bodies of the characters living inside the fiction. The boundary between the film and reality dissolves in the layer of music.
That SIRAT won the Soundtrack Prize at Cannes is not incidental. The sound in this film is not music placed to reinforce emotion. The sound itself carries the film's subject.
The repetitive low-end pulse makes people dance. The same repetitive low-end pulse, at a certain moment, begins to carry a different meaning. The form of the music is continuous with its content.
What the Father and Son Lose
Luis and Esteban came to find a daughter and sister.
When the film ends, what remains is less how that search resolves than how the two have changed.
Esteban is drawn into the rave community. Luis stays at the periphery until the end — never fully inside, never fully outside either, tracing the edge of that community in order not to lose sight of his son. They came to find a daughter, and the journey becomes one of finding a son again.
The absence of the missing daughter works as the film's propulsive force but not as a mystery to be solved. Why did she come to the desert, where did she go — the film never makes this fully clear. That unresolved absence is itself a demonstration of the rave's gravitational pull.
When someone is drawn toward a certain kind of freedom, there is no returning to the place they came from.
On the Experience That Resists Language
There is an account of a film critic who could not find words after the press screening.
Someone who sees hundreds of films a year could not prepare a response during the closing credits. This was not because the film was obscure. It was because the film dismantled the usual critical posture of watching.
The Lumière Brothers' early films include Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. The story goes that the audience fled when they saw the train on screen — the shock of film as something that "moved," experienced for the first time. SIRAT, if it produces something similar, does so not through novelty of image but through the moment when sound and vibration begin to handle the audience's body directly. What was being received as music loses, at a certain point, its separation from pleasure and violence. That experience happens in the body, not in the understanding.
What It Meant to See It in the Theater
Finally: what is lost if you see this film on a streaming service.
Low frequencies are determined by the physical diameter and output of a speaker. The vibration that reaches the chest cannot be reproduced by home cinema systems. Earbuds or a television speaker give you half the film, at most.
The cinema is a space for experiencing the film's content, but in the specific case of SIRAT it also operates on the same principle as the desert rave. Strangers gather in a dark space, wrapped in the same sound, their bodies synchronizing — then the community dissolves. Each person goes back to their life. Something will have changed, slightly, by then.
What changes is different for each person. The attempt to put it into words is what makes the conversation after possible.