Climax's Barrage of Chaos Eventually Becomes Pretty Tiresome

Gaspar Noe is a French filmmaker known for pushing the boundaries in his filmmaking and pushing the buttons of people who watch his films. It was amusing to see other people more versed in his filmography than me refer to Climax as easily his most accessible film considering just what a demented concoction Climax is. It was amusing to think of how this played at my local Cinemark for about a week, a movie theater whose crowd tends to prefer Pure Flix movies over A24 movies. I'd imagine there were walk-outs a-plenty, heck, Climax is so disturbing that employees at the theater likely had a bet to see if anyone would stick around for an entire screening!



Such a gruesome approach is used on a story whose starting point is that a dancing troupe (portrayed by non-actors save for Sofia Boutella) is rehearsing a routine in a large abandoned complex. After they perform their big showy dance number, everybody decides to just get down and party. Lots of rivalries simmer barely underneath the surface of these dancers, like a brother who wants to control his sister, two romantic lovers in the middle of a quarrel and one dude who will have sex with anything that moves. Restrained hostilities turn far more ferocious as everybody realizes that the sangria they've been drinking was spiked with LSD. Climax then proceeds to become more and more out of control to match the individual characters gradually growing dangerously unruly to each other. The drugs have opened up all kinds of nastiness that nobody can put back.

Climax is a unique artistic creation in a number of respects. Gaspar Noe's bats around with conventions of modern cinema like a cat may swat around a ball of yarn. For one thing, the closing credits are placed during the opening sequence and also in the middle of the movie, an interestingly unorthodox touch. Noe also loves to use extended single-takes that go on for an impressively long amount of time. One can only imagine how much preparation it must have taken to execute an early extended dance routine involving all the principal actors that is captured in the span of a single shot! Even more unusual in the feature is that Gaspar Noe apparently only gave the individual actors the starting point of the dancers going mad once they've consumed spiked drinks, leaving the performers to improvise what morbid directions their characters went into next.

And when I say morbid, I do mean morbid, Climax holds back no punches in depicting the misery the various players of Climax endure in this hellscape they've unwittingly entered. There are some effective disturbing moments in the first few instances of Climax showing what kind of gruesome torture the assorted actors in its cast have chosen to explore, nobody can ever accuse these performers of playing it safe with their choices here! However, after a while, Climax begins to resemble more the empty shock value of a Saw sequel rather than the more unsettling bleakness of Robert Bresson or Ari Aster. I'm sure it'll be up many viewers' alleys (I know a lot of people that absolutely adored Climax), but for me, it just ended up being Noe lingering on people in agony without ever considering the "people" part of the equation.

Much like how a funny joke will lose its humor if you hear it one too many times, there are only so many times Climax can show characters screaming in torment before it loses its intended sting. Without any kind of extra character-related motivation or larger subtext to tie the whole thing together, Climax's attempts at unsettling the viewer eventually just become monotonous. It doesn't help that some of the big morbid twists in the final home stretch of the story are surprisingly on the predictable side, further hindering Climax's primary goal of shocking the viewer with whatever kind of obstreperous mayhem its characters get into. Even during its most tedious moments, though, Gaspar Noe's filmmaking style is still extremely adept at visually conveying the idea of a group of people slowly losing their grasp on reality.

The position of the camera during a climactic dance number that intentionally renders on-screen objects hard to make out is an especially good trick, suddenly the viewer is as visually disoriented as the people on the dance floor. Gaspar Noe and cinematographer Benoit Debie certainly know their way around thoughtful camerawork but it's a shame that so much of it is put to use in Climax on stuff that far too often left me cold rather than actually perturbed. Noe's dedication to fiddling with the format of cinema through unorthodox means is extremely admirable even when such dedication is put to use on a more middle-of-the-road production like Climax.