Review: Sirat

Official synopsis: A father (Sergi Lopez) accompanied by his son (Bruno Núñez Arjona) goes looking for his missing daughter at a rave in Morocco. 

Sirat has been making ways lately in the Oscar conversation. It's been nominated for a Golden Globe, it's appeared on more than one Oscar short list. Needless to say my interest in this has sky rocketed in the past few weeks.

And boy, what a 180 this film does on the viewer. Realistically, I didn't go into this expecting a happy ending. It's already about looking for a woman who hasn't been heard from in 5 months, and her last sighting was at a rave. Those aren't great odds, but I was not expecting the level of cruelty this film actually goes to with the characters involved. The back half of this film is such a downer, and some of it felt pretty unnecessary. 

I can see why this film was shortlisted for casting though, They have a diverse cast of characters. Not all are trained actors, and in the more dramatic scenes you can tell, but in the first half of the film where it's somewhat of a road trip vibe, it works really well. As does the score, which is the strongest part of the film. 

Sirat over all is well made, I just think they went a bit overboard in the back half, but the film isn't boring and I'll be thinking about it for quite some time, so I suppose they did their job.

Grade: B-