Over the course of his career, Gaspar Noé has given us many unforgettable and gloriously disturbing titles, from the heartbreaking Irreversible to the provocative Love. His 2018 psychodelic movie, Climax, sometimes gets undeservingly forgotten among the director's more famous works, yet, he managed to come up with something truly unique in it -- the concept of a dance horror. Loosely based on a real-life incident that occured in France in the 1990s, the film takes a simple accident without any real dark consequences and mixes it with a popular genre trope of backwoods horror, to come out as something stunningly beautiful, yet exquisitely disturbing at the same time.
The fact that the main characters, whose drinks are, unbeknownst to them, laced with a psychedelic drug, are dancers, might seem random and inconsequential at first, but it actually becomes significant for the film's underlying meaning. While dancing is unanimously considered a positive force, Noé twists this familiar idea, turning his characters' genuine energy into a dangerous, manic frenzy, and their beautiful movements into a literal dance of death.
'Climax' Is a Beautiful and Disturbing Dance Horror
A large group of young contemporary dancers, led by their choreographer Selva (Sofia Boutella) and manager Emmanuelle (Claude-Emmanuelle Gajan-Maull), gather at an abandoned school building in the middle of nowhere for one final rehearsal before a major tournament in the US. Their glorious dance dissolves into a spontaneous party, where various characters engage in drinking, talking about everything under the sun, from love to sex, and sorting out some very complicated relationships. The activities come off as harmless at first, but the tensions are gradually rising, especially when the dancers realize that the sangria almost all of them, save for a few, have been drinking has been laced with LSD. The efforts to figure out who is responsible only lead to crippling paranoia, bouts of aggression, self-harm, and, eventually, explosions of violence.
Once again, Noé mixes the timeline of the events, but not in the directly reverse order, like in Irréversible. Instead, the film starts with a glimpse of what's to come: an impressive parting shot of a bloodied woman dragging herself through the snow and laughing manically, followed by the end credits. The story then jumps back to the beginning, with the opening credits jammed somewhere later in the movie. This twisted structure, together with exquisite camera flights, extravagant editing, and other aesthetic choices, may give the impression that Climax is altogether focused on style over substance, which the film has been accused of on numerous occasions. However, in Noé's cinema, the particularities of the form are never merely flourishes, included for the sake of it. The camera becomes its own character in Noé's films, and in Climax, he uses its movements to present us with a mesmerizing show, creating a vortex of amazing beauty -- only to wait for the right moment to once again shock the unsuspecting audience.
'Climax' Unleashes Sex and Violence, but Balances Them with Mind-Boggling Cinematography and Imagery
At the beginning of the story, the main characters are introduced through a series of mostly improvised interviews, with their words, views, dreams, and hopes filtered through the eye of the camera as if it were a lie detector. A seemingly endless dance then follows, revealing all the things each of them held back when talking on the record. While all the personalities gathered in this abandoned building are vastly different, they become one through their dancing, coming together for the sake of art. It's this wonderful sense of unity that first got the director fascinated by the art of dance, and it's what dictates the genuine aesthetical gusto with which he chooses to show it. At the same time, like other contemporary provocative auteurs, such as Lars von Trier or Michael Haneke, Noé is laser-focused on dissecting the very essence of human nature, which includes the most unpleasant or outright horrific experiences.
The visuals not only compliment the major theme here, but also become one with it, appearing as a mediator between the director's imagination and the viewers' perspective. Even before the actual blood is spilled, the reality in Climax is painted in red, which has become a trademark of Noé ever since Monica Belluccic entered that tunnel of horrors back in 2002. Unpredictable angles that frequently turn the world upside down, the dance of light, the music that opens a portal to freedom, and an incredible 40-minute-long shot, all serve the film's meaning. But it's not the authentic screams, picturesque blood, and the disturbing bouts of aggression that make Climax so effective and actually scary. Unlike many horror films or public service ads, Noé doesn't make the drugs the real villains of the movie, showing that they don't give people anything new, anything they haven't already possessed. They only bring to light, and sometimes to climax, the things that already lurk inside a person's mind.
Even as the film gets progressively more disturbing in depicting the metamorphoses of the human mind under the influence, and every character is dragged through their personal hell, Noé never resorts to indulging in any sort of morality tale. Drugs are merely a vessel for unleashing what's within -- and the worst thing to discover in there isn't aggression, but fear. It's the primary emotion that turns the film into something akin to body horror in its second half, as it overtakes the young women and men in Climax when they realize their predicament and rush to assign blame, scared of their own primal reactions and revelations. Following the title of one of the greatest outings of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a director whom Noé names among the ones to have influenced him -- fear eats the soul, taking something beautiful and giving it a new, grotesque form, thus turning what started as a spectacle into a tragedy.
Climax 10 stars 9 stars 8 stars 7 stars 6 stars 5 stars 4 stars 3 stars 2 stars 1 star Like R Horror Drama Release Date September 19, 2018 Runtime 97 minutes Director Gaspar Noé Writers Gaspar Noé Producers Édouard Weil, Richard Grandpierre, Vincent Maraval, Brahim Chioua, Eddy Moretti Cast See All Sofia Boutella Selva Romain Guillermic David Souheila Yacoub Lou Kiddy Smile Daddy Where to watch Close WHERE TO WATCH Streaming
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