Sunk-Cost Fallacy: "The phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial."
Near the end of Act I in Sirāt, the film's protagonist, Luis, arrives at a seemingly uncrossable stream. There's no way that his ramshackle van is going to be able to traverse the water and continue to accompany a group of bohemian drifters who've already plowed across in their RVs. But Luis believes that they're his only hope of finding his missing daughter, a vagabond who vanished months prior, possibly within the rave subculture.
Should he turn back?
His 10-year-old son and dog are in his care. Provisions are running out. Ditto with gasoline, and who knows when or where he'll be able to procure more? Martial law has presumably been declared, and he's far from civilization after heading into the Moroccan outback to avoid the military, which broke up the last desert rave in his search.
"This makes no sense. We shouldn't have come. What do we do? The thing is... How do we get out of here? We're lost."
Just when it seems that circumstances have forced him to abort, one of the drifters' RVs reappears—it had been slowly turning around so as to attach a rope to its front. Luis may be towed across if he wishes. Should he accept? He's already invested so much by this point. What's the worst that can happen? How much can he lose? Well... quite a bit more, we learn. Sunk-cost fallacy.
Sirāt opens with a mesmerizing 15-minute sonic assault of EDM—virtually no dialogue, just pounding music accompanied by free-form gyrations of real-life ravers.
In the midst of this revelry, Luis (a total fish-out-of-water in terms of age and dress) and his son are making the rounds, passing out photos of Mar, their missing family member. Nobody's seen her. However, a friendly quintet (all of whom were played by non-professional actors) tell Luis that they're headed to another rave deeper in the desert, and perhaps Mar might be there.
And so the journey begins. Though it gradually becomes apparent that not only do the ravers not know the exact location of Rave #2, there's a decent chance it might not be happening at all. So even these fundamentally serene partygoers gradually turn their thoughts towards survival. Against this backdrop, we hear snippets on the radio which suggest that global warfare is erupting. As the hardships steadily accumulate, Luis is soon pining for the days when he was merely stymied at the bank of that stream.
To provide more exposition about the calamities in store for Luis & Co. would be spilling too many beans, but one might think of Sirāt as a modern-day version of Werner Herzog's 1972 classic, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, where Spanish conquistadors traipsed through the South American jungles in search of El Dorado, the legendary city of gold, and succumbed to all sorts of horrors in the process. The search for Mar is a similarly Quixotic quest, where Luis risks life and limb (along with those of his son) to follow the faintest of leads in a foreign land—one which literally proves to be a mighty adversary.
I view tragic films as cathartic, in that they help me access emotional places that I have a tough time reaching otherwise. I don't mind being moved to sadness. What's important is that storytelling moves me, period.
I've never heard the concept explained as eloquently as when director Oliver Laxe described his work: "This film is about wounded people, it's about humanity. We are all broken; I don't say this with dramatism [sic]. From a psychological perspective and a spiritual perspective, we are broken hearts. Dancing is not selfish. You can be connected to the pain of the world and still celebrate life. Cinema is a place for catharsis. The Greeks, they didn't go to the theater to have fun. They were going to purge, to clean, to protect society from itself. I think cinema can cure the collective imaginary [sic] in that sense. We can connect with this wound that all of us have. That is a healthy thing. We have to die before dying, I think."