Some filmmakers make movies, and then there is Gaspar Noé, who seems to make cinematic experiences that one survives. A Noé film does not so much begin as it ambushes you. You sit down expecting to watch a movie and, somewhere around the point when your stomach begins to tighten and your sense of time becomes unreliable, you realize that you have accidentally purchased a one-way ticket to hell. And there is no refund policy. The French-Argentine filmmaker has made relatively few features, but quantity has never seemed to concern him much. Noé has never struck me as the sort of director who wakes up in the morning thinking, “I should probably make something pleasant.” His films, which include I Stand Alone, Irreversible, and Enter the Void, have a particular talent for burrowing under the skin. They are provocative, confrontational, formally audacious, and often deeply uncomfortable. They don’t politely ask what you think of them. They grab you by the collar and insist that you look.
And then came Climax, which I would happily call a masterpiece, provided that the word “happily” is understood to mean “while sweating profusely.” The premise is almost absurdly simple. A troupe of young dancers has gathered in an abandoned French school to rehearse before embarking on a tour. They sleep there, eat there, dance there, argue there, flirt there, and generally behave like a group of people who have been trapped together in an enormous architectural pressure cooker. After a rehearsal, they throw a party. Someone spikes the sangria with LSD. Nobody knows who did it. And, as is usually the case when a group of people unknowingly drinks LSD, things go downhill. How far downhill?
Imagine a dance recital directed by Stanley Kubrick after Kubrick had been locked inside a nightclub with a broken strobe light. That is Climax. Noé’s great trick is that he tells us, almost immediately, where we’re going. He simply doesn’t tell us how we’re going to get there. The film opens with footage playing on an old television set that consists of interviews and auditions featuring the dancers we are about to meet. They talk about themselves, their ambitions, and their reasons for joining the troupe. It has the benign quality of a documentary about talented young people chasing their dreams. And then you notice what is surrounding the television.
VHS tapes and books are stacked around it, and among them are titles such as Suspiria, Zombi, and Salò: the 120 Days of Sodom. It is one of those wonderful cinematic jokes that isn’t really a joke. Noé might as well have put a handwritten note on the television saying: “Congratulations. You are all going to have a terrible evening.” It is a brilliant bit of foreshadowing because those films aren’t exactly associated with wholesome family entertainment. Suspiria promises supernatural terror. Zombi promises the dead returning to inconvenience the living. Salò promises that whatever happens next, you will probably wish you had stayed home and watched Jeopardy! Instead of explaining the horror to us, Noé leaves breadcrumbs. We simply have to be observant enough to follow them. And once the dancing begins, Climax becomes something else entirely.
One of Noé’s smartest decisions was to cast actual dancers rather than actors pretending to dance. This sounds obvious until you watch the film and realize how extraordinary that choice is. These performers don’t merely look like dancers. They move like dancers. Their bodies understand things that actors can spend years trying to imitate. Their confidence, physicality, aggression, sensuality, rhythm, and exhaustion all feel organic. At the center of the group is Sofia Boutella, who plays Selva, one of the troupe’s leading dancers. Boutella is probably the most recognizable face in the film, having appeared in movies such as The Mummy, but she also comes from the world of dance. That distinction matters. She doesn’t have to pretend that her body belongs to this environment. It already does. The result is that Climax never feels like a conventional Hollywood movie about dancers. There is no inspirational speech about believing in yourself. Nobody is waiting for the big competition where they will prove that hard work pays off. There is no conveniently placed producer who suddenly realizes everyone is a genius. There is just a group of extraordinarily talented people slowly losing control of their minds. Which, in its own way, is considerably more interesting.
The first major dance sequence is one of the great cinematic flexes of recent years. The camera watches the dancers move together in what feels like a single, uninterrupted eruption of bodies, rhythm, sweat, and precision. There is no frantic editing attempting to manufacture energy. No quick cuts to hide a performer who can’t quite dance. No camera trickery designed to convince us that something extraordinary is happening. The extraordinary thing is happening. And the camera simply lets it happen. This is one of Noé’s great weapons, which is the long tracking shot. His camera doesn’t merely observe the characters, it stalks them. It glides through rooms and corridors, follows people into corners, moves past conversations, discovers new forms of chaos, and refuses to give us the merciful relief of a conventional cut, much like Kubrick utilized so much. A cut, after all, is an escape hatch. Noé removes the hatch.
As the LSD begins to take hold, the abandoned school transforms from a rehearsal space into a kind of psychological labyrinth. The dancers pass one another in hallways, rooms, stairwells, and empty spaces, each apparently experiencing a private apocalypse while simultaneously becoming part of everyone else’s. The camera wanders among them as if it, too, has taken something it probably shouldn’t have. There is violence. There is paranoia. There is sex. There is humiliation. There are bodies behaving in ways bodies were probably not designed to behave. At one point, things become so physically and psychologically extreme that you begin to wonder whether the dancers are still dancing or whether the human skeleton has simply resigned. And Noé doesn’t look away.
This is where his apparent obsession with Kubrick becomes particularly interesting. Like Kubrick, Noé understands that architecture can become psychology. The physical environment of Climax isn’t merely a setting, but rather it becomes a character. The school seems to change as the night progresses. Corridors grow longer. Rooms become traps. Familiar faces become threats. Space itself becomes unreliable. The camera turns the building into a nervous system. And we are trapped inside it.
What makes Climax particularly effective, though, is that the horror isn’t supernatural. There are no ghosts. There are no demons emerging from the basement. And nobody discovers an ancient curse carved into the walls. The monster is chemistry, amplified by fear, suspicion, jealousy, sexuality, and the very human inability to remain calm when everyone around you appears to have lost their mind. That may be scarier. Noé also understands something that many filmmakers forget, which is that music isn’t decoration. In Climax, music is oxygen. The soundtrack is almost constantly alive, drawing from electronic music, techno, pop, and tracks associated with artists such as Daft Punk, the Rolling Stones, and Soft Cell. The film doesn’t simply use music to accompany the dancing. The music dictates the film’s pulse. It becomes the bloodstream of the entire experience. You don’t watch Climax so much as you enter its rhythm. And then the rhythm turns against you.
That is the genius of the film. The same thing that produces beauty also produces terror. The dancing is exhilarating. The music is intoxicating. The bodies are magnificent. The choreography is hypnotic. And then, almost imperceptibly, the pleasure becomes panic. It’s the cinematic equivalent of realizing halfway through the best party you’ve ever attended that everyone has been poisoned. What I admire most about Climax is its confidence. Noé doesn’t seem particularly interested in whether every viewer will enjoy the experience. In fact, I’m fairly certain he knows some people will hate it. That’s part of the fun. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about a filmmaker making something this strange and refusing to sand down its edges for mass consumption. Movies like this are increasingly rare.
There is an enormous amount of filmmaking today designed to make sure everyone has a good time. Characters explain themselves. Stories explain themselves. Visual effects explain themselves. Franchise mythology explains itself again, just in case you were making popcorn when they explained it the first time. Noé does the opposite. He gives you a camera, a group of dancers, an abandoned building, some sangria, a questionable quantity of LSD, and absolutely no emotional flotation device. Good luck.
For me, that’s part of what makes Climax so memorable. It is not simply a film about people taking drugs and losing their minds. It is a film about bodies, control, sexuality, community, isolation, fear, and the fragile illusion that we are ever really in control of ourselves. The dancers begin the film as a unified organism. They rehearse together. They move together. They celebrate together. Then the drug enters the bloodstream. And suddenly everyone is alone. That transformation is what makes the film more than a technical exercise. Beneath all the virtuoso camera movement, the elaborate choreography, the neon colors, the pulsating music, and the escalating insanity is something surprisingly human: a group of people discovering how quickly civilization can disappear when trust does.
There are movies that you admire. There are movies you enjoy. And then there are movies that crawl into your head and refuse to leave. Climax belongs to the third category. It is beautiful and ugly, graceful and grotesque, funny and horrifying, exhilarating and exhausting. It feels like a dance film that wandered into a horror movie, swallowed a handful of bad decisions, and decided never to come back. I loved it. I also felt like I needed to sit quietly for a few minutes afterward and reconsider several of my life choices. That, perhaps, is the Gaspar Noé experience. He doesn’t make movies you simply watch. He makes movies you endure, argue with, laugh at, recoil from, and occasionally dream about later.
Climax is one of his most audacious works, and for my money, one of the finest examples of what happens when formal filmmaking technique, music, dance, horror, and pure cinematic madness collide. There isn’t really another movie like it. And there probably shouldn’t be. But I’m very glad there is one.
