I’m sure Esteban is fine.

Sirāt

The idea that it’s possible to make sense of pain is something we tell ourselves in order to feel like we have control over pain. Placed in a coherent context, even suffering can appear natural, a cruel but necessary color without which the human tapestry would be incomplete. It’s all bullshit, of course – we’re all just scrambling through the day, trying really hard to keep any number of grim oopsies from turning our insides into our outsides, but are you really going to face that sad reality without the help of a good lie? It’s bullshit or booze, baby.

Sirāt isn’t telling a story that lends itself to traditional structure, so it doesn’t bother with one. It also feels no obligation to provide redemption or hope, so don’t go in expecting those, either. It’s mostly a descent from one purgatory to another, during which time the characters experience a third, slightly less awful – but still extremely fucked up! – purgatory. It’s a film rich in displacements and feeling no urgency to provide meaning.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t any, of course. I’m just saying you gotta earn that shit. Every sequence in Sirāt would be the final sequence of the movie this movie could be if it had any interest in being that movie, which it does not. Not only are we routinely denied catharsis, we’re not even given a dramatic build-up to catharsis. We’re sent on a journey defined by a decaying orbit of vibes, with characters only realizing they passed a point of no return long after they already passed it.  

This film rides the line between absurdism, quietism, and human darkness so well that you never get the chance to settle into any one, a masterful manipulation of tone that keeps you perpetually off-balance. Sirāt’s events are random and cruel and deliberately stupid, but the way in which they hit the characters is always played completely straight, which makes the payoff to every grim situation even harder to watch. The movie itself eventually collapses around the characters, which in any other film would be a criticism, but here it’s all part of the journey.

The End

It’s really hard to tell a story that is defined by absurd things but is itself not absurd – I Think You Should Leave is a comedy for a reason. The secret is in the sincerity – events can be as strange and as singular and as detached from meaning as you want as long as the human impact is played straight. Do that, and things will hit just as hard – maybe even harder – than they would in a normal film.