We've Found The Darkest Movie Of 2025 — Here's Why You Need To Watch It [Fantastic Fest]

Living in 2025 can feel like living through the day before the end. You know things are about to implode, but there are limits to what you can do. It seems we have moved on from movies about what it was like to live in the early days of lockdown and seeing the world pause to a halt and mostly ignore the severity of it (except no one told Ari Aster that). Now we're starting to see movies about living through the end of times and how we can do nothing but keep on dancing as the bodies hit the floor.

At least that's the thesis of the darkest movie of 2025, the movie that best encapsulates what it feels like to be alive in this very moment in history. It also happens to be a movie with a kickass soundtrack and killer sound design that begs to be experienced in a theater.

The movie is "Sirāt," the latest film by French-born Spanish filmmaker Óliver Laxe ("Fire Will Come," "You Are All Captains"), which won the Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival (to be fair, a festival known for celebrating sicko filmmaking) and was selected as Spain's entry to the Academy Awards.

On the surface, "Sirāt" is a story of people attending a rave in the Moroccan desert, and a father and son who are searching for their missing daughter and sister. But when a large convoy of military vehicles raids the rave and soldiers start taking all "EU citizens" and placing them into custody, "Sirāt" starts unraveling a background conflict with increasingly higher and more serious stakes. What follows is a haunting movie about found family, about the importance of music and interpersonal connections, about war brewing in the background, about the end of the world, and the darkest and most perfect encapsulation of 2025.

Laxe never fully explains the political or social backstory of "Sirāt," and he never fully paints a picture of what is happening right off-screen. All we know we hear from radio stations that the characters listen to a few times throughout the film, with talks of civilians massed at national borders, an armed conflict between two countries, and also statements from the NATO Secretary General preparing EU citizens.

Still, for our main character, Luis (Sergi López, also known as the despicable fascist captain from "Pan's Labyrinth") and his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), nothing is as important as finding their daughter/sister. The suggestion of societal collapse is just background noise, something they can't really stop and think about as they join a group of ravers on their way to Mauritania to another rave, and hopefully their missing family.

Not that "Sirāt" uses the advent of WWIII (as a radio broadcast reports) as mere flavor for the story, as just something unique to have in the background. Every aspect of the story is impacted by not just the current, brewing conflict, but by years of struggle. We see this when the group drives through ghost towns, ruins, remnants of communities that have been beaten up and washed away over the years, signs of peaceful times long gone. Laxe and co-writer Santiago Fillol masterfully weave in these hints of the larger armed hostilities into the story in a way that doesn't make this a war movie specifically, but nevertheless a story where war is ever-present.

The characters can ignore it all they want, just write the conflict off as something happening far away while they drive through remote mountain passes and deserts, but by the time they realize they've walked right into a minefield in the middle of the desert, there is no ignoring their place in the conflict, no escaping the end of the world.

A title card at the start of the film explains the meaning of the title, which refers to the mythical Islamic bridge across hell that everyone must walk across to reach Paradise on the Day of Judgement. Likewise, the road the characters travel on is just as perilous, and any distraction is fatal. It can be easy to walk out of "Sirāt" and think it is a movie about embracing life while you can and dancing your way through the apocalypse, but I don't think that's what Laxe has in mind, necessarily. There are elements of it, like how the film definitely makes desert raves look and sound rad as hell, and the found family the characters form is comforting.

Still, the moment the characters allow themselves to give in to distraction and try to forget about their misery and grief, things go from bad to worse, as "Sirāt" drops one gut punch after another. There is no escapism, and even during a pivotal scene where the characters get high and start an impromptu dance in the desert, the film doesn't employ any trippy visuals to get us to see what they see, choosing instead to show them as lonely and desperate people in a horrifically empty world. This is a film about how trying to ignore the horrors of 2025 doesn't mean you can escape them.

Like another Fantastic Fest movie that's like a shotgun to the chest, "The Coffee Table," "Sirāt" is a bleak, horrifying movie, but not one you'll forget anytime soon.