Climax

A french dance troupe, staying for a long weekend in some sort of school building, decide to party after rehearsal, while a wintry blizzard rages outside. Someone spikes the punch, and all hell breaks loose.

The dance scenes are engaging, the visuals hypnotic, the performances are somehow real and completely over the top, and the chaos and carnage intense and memorable. Long, drawn out tracking shots, one of which lasts for 40+ minutes, follow the dancers as the drugs take hold and any hint of humanity falls by the wayside.

Awful, intense, nightmarish film that I would never recommend to anyone, and would probably never watch again, but was so insanely good. Makes me want to take more acid, but also never take it again...

Be warned, not for the feint of heart, the most intense film I have seen in a long, long time.

A disgusting, morally reprehensible work of insane genius

LSD or mainly alcohol can bring you back to a more reptilian way of thinking, you are not human anymore. It is all about survival, about reproducing the species, about sex and domination. The moment we start losing control of the logical brain we go to a psychotic way of thinking.

• Gaspar Noé; "Gaspar Noé on why his orgiastic Cannes sensation Climax should be shown to kids: 'It's very educational'" (Kaleem Aftab); The Telegraph (May 15, 2018)

Climax, the latest film from Argentinian-French provocateur Gaspar Noé, is a disturbing, depraved, disgusting, and debauched piece of absolute insane genius that I thoroughly adored from beginning to end, and which I never, ever, want to see again.

Lord of the Flies (1954) by way of Heronimus Bosch or Zdzisław Beksiński, Climax is what you might get if you mashed-up Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975), Darren Aronofsky's mother! (2017), and Anne Fletcher's Step Up (2006); a dance movie that morphs into a horror film, which then attempts to show the audience a literal hell on Earth. In this sense, it's a perfect fit for Noé's oeuvre, focusing as it does on physical disintegration, psychological collapse, and what could be termed "scorched psyche(s)". However, considering he is such an infamous figure in world cinema, and considering how honed his overriding thematic preoccupations are, it's strange when you consider that in a career spanning twenty years, Noé has directed only four features prior to Climax; Seul contre tous (1998), Irréversible (2002), Enter the Void (2009), and Love (2015). If you've seen any of them, you'll know that his reputation for excess and pushing both his characters and his audiences to the extreme is well earned, and with Climax, he takes that audience and those characters further than ever before. Granted, there's nothing here to rival Le Boucher's sickening attack on hi...