Critic Reviews

With the band’s headstrong co-founders leading their tale, Sirens is a powerful reminder that punk isn’t dead if you know where to look.

Baghdadi has harnessed something truly special. Like its fractious characters, Sirens is both humble and arresting, relatable and unique. It will stay with you long after the band has played their final chords.

Rita Baghdadi’s new documentary Sirens is a smartly crafted, hugely entertaining look at the band as it goes through growing pains, fights for bookings, and navigates inter-band dyke drama against the backdrop of a city under constant threat of attack.

Baghadi and lead editor Grace Zahrah piece together the footage into a collage of yearning, ambition, and what can only be called gumption. It's inspirational, of course, but it's also thoughtful and meditative.

It reaches past the usual rock clichés to recognize that the struggle these women face is more immediate than striving to perform for sold-out crowds or become signed by a label. This is about surviving a chaotic environment marked by past violence while still entrenched in present-day political revolution.

Wanting more is a criticism, but it’s a luxury criticism. This documentary builds a world you want to explore further.

The ending, in which the reunited Sirens play before an enthusiastic crowd, is heart-tugging and rousing, even for non-metal heads.

For as choppy as Sirens can be in its too-short 78-minute runtime, it’s easy to chalk that up to the difficulties of filming during COVID. But what we do get is certainly crowd-pleasing, a riotous doc that combines likable personalities with thrumming guitar licks and its subjects’ relatable yearning to find their voice and their power.

Sirens is an engaging behind-the-scenes doc about this band.

Thought-provoking, beautifully edited and told, Sirens explores the band members’ relationship with each other, gender, and conformity in a society that isn’t always open about such things.