I wish I could write an objective review of this movie, but the first third to half of it was a straight-out portrayal of a continental Western European working class subculture (teknival/French hardtek) that myself and many others grew up intimately familiar with, on a visceral, physical level: the complete illegality of it, the walls of speakers, the shoes danced in until they are in tatters, the smell of the petrol generators, the dancing in formation facing the wall, 145–180bpm, up for days on a haphazard haze of chillums, speed, ketamine and acid, hugging the speakers, praying to the speakers, driving unsuitable vehicles up tortuous remote roads whilst hotboxing hash to and from the wall of speakers. The people who went to these raves were opting out, mostly temporarily, from the drudgery of menial jobs and the restricted realm of optionality available to misfits in the minor urban outposts of provincial Europe. The places where nothing much happens. We danced to forget the drudgery that awaited us on Monday. Friends of ours didn’t make it, they succumbed to car crashes or overdoses or worse, they experienced so much psychedelic-enhanced weekend beauty and freedom that they lost the ability to code-switch back into being normie enough to keep a job and wasted away as beggars, too poor to party, too crazy to work.
I also missed how working class the teknival rave scene is. How disinterested they are in hyperconnectivity to the global “discourse”. The working class is typically and by necessity intensely regional and locally specific, while those a tier above them tend to adapt to that much lamented global homogenisation: brands, lifestyles, fashion, causes. This is perhaps why in much more affluent Australia we seem so hopelessly caught up in the culture wars that originate from the big capital cities of the Anglophone world; it’s easy to forget that for many, the world isn’t just a hop and a skip away. These euro-ravers aren’t bougie jetsetting kids with flawless skincare floating between Melbourne and Berlin summers self-identifying as whatever the latest trendy topic of hyper-online discourse is, adept with the latest acronyms, fashion, and mannerisms, endlessly posturing and pointing fingers at their own kind for their cosplay failures.
The ethos that ruled at free teknivals was that it was always free and open to anyone, and yes, the more you stuck around the more you became part of the tribe, the more you started shaving your hair funnily and getting tattoos and piercings and going more than a bit feral. The obviously daggy working class dad in the movie isn’t treated as a leper breaking their fourth wall, he’s just another working man with rough hands amongst others who are no strangers to the drudgery of unglamorous labour done out of necessity.
I felt, watching it, the brief shock and nostalgia of meeting my younger self again, that boy who believed the party was not an interruption of life but its truest form. The film understands that escape is sometimes necessary, but it is never enough. Yet I would not go back to the subcultures of my youth. Whatever beauty existed there was real, but it was also contingent, borrowed time lit by headlights and generator fumes, always purchased against the morning after. The teknival’s freedoms were real, and so was its beauty, but both depended on suspension, on postponement, on the fantasy that Monday might never come. It always came. The party could hold reality off for a night or two, sometimes for years, but never for good. The world does not soften because we step outside it; it hardens and punishes those who fail to adapt.
I’m deliberately holding back on discussing anything about acts II and III, because they portray exactly the limits of this approach to life by withdrawing into a fantasy. I don’t want to rob people of the experience with spoilers, as the film must be experienced. The movie is able to lull you into this beautiful illusion of the rave as utopia, and then viciously pull the rug out from under you. The way innocence is ripped away in Sirat is a profound cinematic experience, and it works brilliantly as a devastating critique of Europe.
What I can talk about instead of the plot is the argument the film is having with its own director. Laxe did the festival rounds telling interviewers that Sirat comes from his conviction that this society is unsustainable, that we’re all dancing at the end of something. Every interviewer nods along gravely, because civilisational pessimism is the entry fee of European auteur cinema now, its little catechism, and I sat there having loved the film and thinking: mate, that is not the film you made.
Hegel, of all people, diagnosed this type more than two hundred years ago, and gave it a name too good to be left to the philosophy departments: the schöne Seele, the beautiful soul.
It lives in dread of besmirching the splendour of its inner being by action and an existence; and, in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world, and persists in its self-willed impotence. — Hegel
The beautiful soul keeps its hands clean by never using them. Too pure to act, because acting means compromise, means getting implicated, so it judges instead, and the judging feels like a form of action but really is nothing but a pose. Hegel says it eventually evaporates like a vapour and he meant it as diagnosis rather than compliment, describing the oldest failure mode of the moralising classes, one that changes costumes but refuses to die.
The costume changes since the sixties counterculture are well documented. The hippies ran the withdrawal experiment with incense and LSD and brown rice and geodesic domes, my generation ran it with diesel and Polish speed, and there occurred one of my favourite events in all of legislative history: after one free party too many on English commons, the British parliament banned outdoor gatherings of music “characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”, which remains the only time a legislature has attempted a formal definition of techno, and they did a better job than most music journalists. Every crusty in Europe could recite that phrase from memory. Getting legislated against is the closest thing a subculture gets to a knighthood. The sound systems crossed the Channel, France and Italy got the teknival, and I got my raver youth.
None of us wanted to look at the truth, then or now: the whole beautiful apparatus ran on the world it was fleeing. The speaker-bearing trucks were army surplus. The generators drank the same diesel as the factories. Half the crews were on the dole, bankrolled by the payslips of everyone still inside, and the chemicals came down the same supply chains as the groceries. The French guys with the pungent amphetamine paste were not synthesising it from moonlight and rebellion. There is and was no outside. There was a weekend, which the remaining week of labour and industry paid for.
Scale up that beautiful soul subculture and you get the soul of the old continent of the past forty years. After 1989 Europe decided that history was over and the weekend could be made permanent. Robert Kagan got sneered at in every language of the union for writing that Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus, that Americans understood the Hobbesian reality of the world as opposed to the Kantian post-historical paradise of eternal peace. Germany switched off its nuclear reactors in a fit of moral hygiene while building a total dependency on cheap Russian gas, and called the arrangement Wandel durch Handel, change through trade, a phrase that has always sounded to me less like a foreign policy and more like something you tell yourself at 4am to keep the vibe going. Defence budgets shrank to tithes, the tithes went unpaid, and the American security guarantee was quietly reclassified from a favour that enabled the continent-wide escapism of the beautiful soul to merely something that existed in perpetuity like the weather. The wars moved offshore, like carbon emissions. A politics of purity always subcontracts its impurities to somebody, and the beautiful soul’s one non-negotiable is that the somebody is never her. Thirty years of a continent dancing in formation, facing the wall, while the generator hums somewhere out of earshot, in Norfolk, Virginia.
In Sirat, the radio plays news of a war. They switch it off and drive onwards.
The easy ending to this essay would be to file the film next to Capitalist Realism, call the ravers hypocrites and Europe a free rider, and nicely conclude with socialist platitudes about the evils of capitalism. I owe Mark Fisher far too much to be glib about him, k-punk being the door through which I wandered into philosophy decades ago, but this reading of the film leaves us conceding too much to the beautiful soul hypocrite I am seeking here to dismember. Tell a tekno crusty that his freedom runs on diesel and dole money and he’ll agree with you cheerfully, somewhere between the chillum and the comedown; it was never news to anyone who was actually there. The deeper problem with the hypocrisy charge is that it accepts the beautiful soul’s founding premise: that the world is a crime scene, and the only open question is whether you flee it or profit from it. The real error sits further up, with the easy abstractions we use to decry the world as fallen and corrupt.
The strangest help I’ve had with the verdict problem arrived last August: Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits (Becoming Press, 2025) by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo. Their claim is that capitalism was never a human social system in the first place, not an ideology, not a mode of production, not a phase of our history, but an autonomous, self-replicating algorithm that has been using our species as a temporary and incidental substrate, and is now visibly finishing with us: lifting away from soil, bodies and fixed costs into pure financial abstraction, derivatives folded on derivatives, airline loyalty points worth more than the airlines that issue them. Their most counterintuitive move is a rewritten theory of value. Value, they argue, is not produced by labour transforming matter; it is produced in the hold, the interval of friction and delay between a purchase and a sale. Volatility, not efficiency, is the feedstock. The hold, the suspended interval where all the value lives, is also a perfect description of the raver weekend.
If they are even half right, what quietly disappears from the courtroom is the defendant. Their capitalism has no ideology, no crises, no enemies, no face; it does not oppress you, it does not exploit you, it does not know you exist. The beautiful soul cannot survive this reimagining, because her entire constitution is the accusation. Here is Laxe, to Dazed this time, speaking as a raver among ravers: “this society is not sustainable. We just wait for the shift.” The first sentence is the beautiful soul theology, existing to service a need: the world has to be ending, otherwise my refusal of it is just fear. The second sentence is waiting as Hegel’s self-willed impotence conjugated in the first person plural, the shift expected to arrive from elsewhere, like the trucks and the dole and the American fleet, so that nobody at the party ever has to build anything, fund anything, or defend anything. Nietzsche knew the first move intimately, he called it ressentiment, the accounting trick by which everything strong and functional and given gets re-entered as evidence for the prosecution. But ressentiment needs a face to accuse, a will behind the injury, and Poliks and Trillo have quietly removed the face. You cannot prosecute weather, you can only build drainage, or drown theatrically. To counter these histrionics of the too beautiful, Nietzsche left us his infamous antidote:
Amor fati: let that henceforth be my love! I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. Looking aside, let that be my sole negation! — Nietzsche, The Gay Science
This is not quietism or trite Instagram gratitude, but a far harder discipline: look at the actual world before filing charges, and admit that every verdict smuggles the judge’s biography into the ruling. My own is sitting right up there in the first paragraphs of this essay, which is why I don’t entirely trust my own nostalgia either. Amor fati toward an indifferent process is not mysticism but seamanship. Because the actual world, looked at, is not a crime scene. It is the only apparatus that has ever kept eight billion people alive at the same time, most of them born within living memory of famine being an ordinary event, and it manages this through exactly the machinery the beautiful soul cannot face without flinching: container ports, ammonia plants, actuarial tables, cold chains, hydrocarbons.
Somewhere along the way as I grew up I started finding a line of high-voltage pylons at dusk as moving as a wall of speakers, stacked and humming, holding back a dark much older than Monday.
Poliks and Trillo, for their part, file the critique industry better than any of its enemies ever managed. One of their five master categories is Drag: all the bureaucratic and performative labour by which humans try to attach themselves to capital as it lifts away, friction that slows nothing down but comes along for the ride. It’s hard to read that definition and not see the critical theory seminar. And their value theory is where it gets cruel, because if value really is made in the hold, in all that delay and churn, then critique was never outside the ship and was never the storm battering it. It’s freight. The panels, the journals, the prize-winning despair, the workshopped novel where nothing gets made or sold or fixed and capitalism just sits there like weather (the one thing the genre got right, by accident): all of it rides in the hold, exactly where the book says the value gets made.
One more of their coinages I can’t leave alone: wildcode, the ungoverned residue capitalism leaves behind as it moves, terrain nobody administers anymore, where whoever’s still around improvises. I know that terrain. Every free party of my youth happened in it, the disused quarries, the decommissioned airbases with weeds coming through the runway, the warehouses that departed industries didn’t bother locking, the whole physical footprint of capital that had already lifted somewhere better. We told ourselves we were escaping the system but we were partying in its exhaust.
Where I part ways with the book is the mood. Poliks and Trillo refuse Land’s habit of eroticising capital’s inhumanity, credit to them, but they keep his horror register, all the blobs and cysts and moulting, corporate structure described like something out of Cronenberg, and they frame the whole project as a warning while pointedly offering no prescriptions, as if declining to propose anything were rigour rather than the oldest beautiful-soul reflex in the repertoire. They get the physics right and the mood wrong. If capital really is indifferent, that’s not a horror, it’s a material; wind and tide never cared about us either, yet here we are.
Which brings me back to the desert, and the one thing I can say about the back half of Sirat without wrecking it. The book’s final category, the one it saves for the bottom of the stack, is the Last Mile, the point where abstraction runs out and physical contact resumes, extraction and delivery and care, “the last mile of bones and blood into the earth”, where capital’s departure doesn’t leave liberation behind, it leaves a vacancy, so older, cruder forms of violence move back in. The book came out three months after the film premiered at Cannes, so nobody borrowed from anybody, yet that is exactly where Laxe takes his ravers. Whatever comes for these people, it doesn’t come from the system, it comes where the system stops, past the last checkpoint, off the last road, out where there’s no grid and no ambulance and none of the boring apparatus that the whole subculture, and the whole European continent behind it, had agreed to find contemptible. The desert isn’t outside civilisation, it’s what’s left when civilisation is subtracted, and that remainder is the whole horror of the film. Laxe thinks he filmed a society dancing at its own funeral but what he actually filmed is an audit of everything that society was quietly providing for the dancers the whole time, and the film knows it even if he doesn’t.
I said above that I would not go back. I went back to Monday like everyone does, and the given world, over the years, did the thing I least expected of it, it started to disclose itself. Freight moving at night. Payroll clearing. The same supply chain that puts antibiotics in a country town once put ketamine within reach of provincial teenagers, same trucks, completely indifferent to what any of us wanted from it, and somewhere in there I stopped experiencing that indifference as inherently ominous. The dancefloor did teach me something true, that there are states of mind where you can say the great Nietzschean Yes to all of it that don’t require psychedelics or raves.
We danced to forget Monday and it came anyway, it always does, and at some point I stopped considering the arrival of the week a tragedy. Ask me again, some wet miserable Tuesday in winter though.