Climax (2018)
Directed by Gaspar Noé
When a dance troupe is lured to an empty school, a bowl of drug-laced sangria causes their jubilant rehearsal to descend into a dark and explosive nightmare as they try to survive the night—and find who's responsible—before it's too late.
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20 films that influenced Climax
What critics say influenced Climax
Climax works better than most “drug” films because it doesn’t show us what the characters are seeing on LSD but only from the outside: howling and screeching and rolling around like Isabelle Adjani in Andrzej ?u?awski’s Possession.
At one point, Noé virtually restages the demon birth/miscarriage scene from Zulawski’s Possession (another title spotted in that pile of VHS tapes), evoking the mania of Isabelle Adjani in her most memorably freaky performance.
All this is shown on a colour CRT television framed by stacks of books (a mix of philosophy, including Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil , and film theory texts) and VHS tapes— Suspiria (1977) and Possession (1981) stand out as two of the most relevant—which presumably constitute Noé’s personal canon and also serve as pre-emptive annotations of the cinematic assault to come.
Unlike many of Noé’s past efforts, which tend to fall apart the moment a viewer deigns to analyze them beyond an immediate visceral reaction, Climax has more to offer than its all-bangers hard-house soundtrack and a magnificent rendition of Isabelle Adjani’s Possession spasms from Boutella.
The dance school setting may recall Suspiria , but Noe allows a more pronounced homage to Zulawski’s Possession (1981) with an aside featuring Sofia Boutella, a central figure as the troupe leader, as well as the most recognizable cast member out of a diverse crew of international dancers.
And right out of the gate, Noé parallels his desires with that of his characters, asking us to contemplate his own worst nightmare—a world without Possession , without Harakiri , without Suspiria —before then dazzling us with the means by which he staves off that nightmare: his will to create.
A stack of video cassettes is piled next to a TV playing an audition reel for a dance troupe who will eventually be revealed as our cast; the titles on display include Argento’s Suspiria, Polanski’s Possession, Fassbinder’s Querelle and Pasolini’s Salò.
A selection of video tape spines shown next to a television screen that played the preliminary video introductions of each character acts as neat shorthand to introduce the direction that this doomed trip will soon take; references to films like Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò and Andrzej ?u?awski’s Possession all foreshadow what is to come in one way or another.
Even as Psyche expresses this anxiety about falling under the influence of a film as much as of drugs, her interview, and those of the other dancers, are shown on a television set alongside a pile of videos whose titles – Suspiria, Possession, Hara-Kiri, Querelle, La Maman et la Putain, Un Chien Andalou, Labyrinth Man (i.e. the French title of Eraserhead) – will also cast a dark spell over what follows, dosing the narrative of Climax with their own specific motifs and moods (chiefly free love, writhing hysteria, disorientation and danses macabres, infanticide, suicide and transcendence).
There are VHS copies of Suspiria, Un Chien Andalou, Salò and Harakiri, and books by Nietzsche and on Taxi Driver , Murnau and Fritz Lang.
From here, we flash back to the beginning; a series of taped audition interviews with dancers, played on an old TV (it’s the mid-1990s) alongside which sit VHS tapes of extreme cinema favourites: Argento’s Suspiria , Pasolini’s Salò, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou – all indications of what is to come.
Demonic fits reminiscent of the infamous “rape of Christ” sequence from Ken Russell’s The Devils are viewed from overhead – Busby Berkeley goes to hell.
Choreographed by Nina McNeely, the dancers krump, vogue, and waack in ecstatic abandon, their movements recalling Jennie Livingston’s radical documentary of New York’s “house” and ball culture Paris Is Burning (1990), a queer touchstone whose impact has since filtered into the larger culture.
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Fosse might otherwise be a curious point of reference for a Gaspar Noé film, but in Climax, All That Jazz is a difficult point of reference to avoid, particularly as the film moves forward and drug use takes over as a primary ‘plot’ point.
Even as Psyche expresses this anxiety about falling under the influence of a film as much as of drugs, her interview, and those of the other dancers, are shown on a television set alongside a pile of videos whose titles – Suspiria, Possession, Hara-Kiri, Querelle, La Maman et la Putain, Un Chien Andalou, Labyrinth Man (i.e. the French title of Eraserhead) – will also cast a dark spell over what follows, dosing the narrative of Climax with their own specific motifs and moods (chiefly free love, writhing hysteria, disorientation and danses macabres, infanticide, suicide and transcendence).
There are VHS copies of Suspiria, Un Chien Andalou, Salò and Harakiri, and books by Nietzsche and on Taxi Driver , Murnau and Fritz Lang.
From here, we flash back to the beginning; a series of taped audition interviews with dancers, played on an old TV (it’s the mid-1990s) alongside which sit VHS tapes of extreme cinema favourites: Argento’s Suspiria , Pasolini’s Salò, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou – all indications of what is to come.
Arenas of light, space, neon color and pulsating, writhing movement intersect with a Bosch-like abyss of unrelenting, escalating dread—not unlike the implacable provocations of Darren Aronofsky’s recent mother!
Tensions racial and sexual combust in a hectic grand finale that makes mother!
Spiraling his camera upside down, through the narrow passageways of his single setting, and around elaborately choreographed confrontations between these writhing and possessed characters ( Mother! comparisons have been made, and they’re not off base), Noé redeems and justifies his sensation-junkie insistence on stretching every scene into an endless, slow-motion death dance.
The madness escalates in such a way that comparisons to the final third of Darren Aronofsky‘s “mother!” are inevitable, but that film had thematic ambitions to match its filmmaking chops, and the same cannot be claimed for Noé.
But here, as in fellow self-styled provocateur Darren Aronofsky’s mother!
Chaos, of course, will reign in Noé’s film, which takes place in a kind of purgatorial space not unlike the one at the center of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel , where a privileged group is unable—or, more likely, unwilling—to leave a drawing room that comes to reflect a world’s ills.
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From here, we flash back to the beginning; a series of taped audition interviews with dancers, played on an old TV (it’s the mid-1990s) alongside which sit VHS tapes of extreme cinema favourites: Argento’s Suspiria , Pasolini’s Salò, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou – all indications of what is to come.
Not for nothing is Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Analou nestled in between Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom on the left side of the TV set from which Climax’s characters broadcast their dreams.
A stack of video cassettes is piled next to a TV playing an audition reel for a dance troupe who will eventually be revealed as our cast; the titles on display include Argento’s Suspiria, Polanski’s Possession, Fassbinder’s Querelle and Pasolini’s Salò.