Climax (2018)

Gaspar Noe’s newest film - Climax, is his most fun film to date and his best film to date. And that’s saying a lot.

Climax is about a group of European dancers in France hanging out in a dancehall, doing their final rehearsal for their last dance performance of the season. Things are great, fun and exciting until they start to realize that someone has spiked their refreshments with huge amounts of LSD. Let the games began!

Gaspar Noe spares no expensive depicting what it is to be unbelievably high, with nightmare logic, violence, sexual gratification, jealousy, distrust, suicidal thoughts, his classic touch of misogyny and coloured lighting. All wrapped in a grounded, supposed true-tale with the best dance choreography caught on film in recent memory, and an infectious beat bumping soundtrack that makes you think everything with be fine until the nightmare kicks in.

 

Climax has you carefully get to know its characters, and puts certain personality types together for an anticipation of dread when you realize things are going to get worse. Especially when one of its characters is a child. Climax pulls from the familiar human experience of being under the influence; when at a party and witnessing a tiny disagreement between two people and forgetting about it, but only later on in the night realizing it has turned into a physical altercation, due to massive alcohol consumption. The film takes us through a series of one-take familiar drunken party experiences, and dials it up to 1000. Using an Irreversible type logic, Climax eventually shows us the aftermath of something we forgot or were thinking about in a prior scene, and that now we have discovered with a character of the film just discovering the aftermath themselves.

 

The reason this could be Gaspar Noe’s best film, is because while holding all the classic Gaspar Noe tropes of hell on earth, Climax also provides variety from those tropes, with amazing choreography, great soundtrack, variety in hellish plot points and surprisingly colourful characters, directed in a truly absorbing frightfully striking way. One negative I could say, is that Climax doesn’t paint its black characters in the greatest of portrayals but none the less, Climax is a must, an ACTUAL must. 9/10.

• Maurice Jones