Review: Climax

Climax, directed by Gaspar Noé, tells the tale of a bunch of dance students under the leadership of Selva (Sofia Boutella) throwing a party and having a grand old time. All that changes when somebody spikes the sangria with LSD and the party slowly but surely devolves into a cacophony of madness and sin.

Gaspar Noé has fairly recently made a name for himself making some of the most avant-garde films to come out of French cinema. After making films like Irréversible and Enter the Void I expected this film to be just as brutally disturbing to watch as those films were, and it basically was. Like Noé’s previous films, Climax was quite the experience to watch, packed with beautiful yet terrifying imagery, a haunting yet bumping soundtrack, and some great performances all around.

Noé’s direction is on point for this film. The first thing you will notice about this film is its cinematography. A lot of this film is done in one take, especially its second half, and a lot of those shots were incredibly impressive. You can tell that there was a lot of heavy coordination and some serious choreography going on with each long take, and the results look absolutely stunning. The film also makes use of visually revealing details to us through the cinematography; as the party slogs on and slowly starts devolving to madness, the camera movements reflect that over the course of the party. It starts off very fluid and smooth, then it slowly starts becoming more jarring and hectic as the cameraman literally starts dragging the camera along the floor near the end.

A lot of the performances were also surprisingly fantastic. Being the only professional actor, Sofia Boutella gives an absolutely incredible performance in this film. Everyone else were originally dancers and a good amount of them did surprisingly well despite no prior acting experience. The soundtrack was incredibly well thought out, the lighting plays a fantastic role in transitioning the tone over the course of the film, and all the characters were interesting and very well thought out.

Now there were some gripes I had with this film. One thing that kinda bothered me was the film’s editing. This is probably due to Noé’s personal style as a filmmaker, but I honestly found a lot of the editing to be very obnoxious, from the random subliminal messages popping up every now and then to the random cuts to black separating each shot and scene. As I mentioned before, a lot of the cast were primarily dancers with no acting experience, and while a good amount of them give great performances, there were a couple that were not so great. Aside from those there were not much else that bothered me about this film.

Overall this was a incredibly well made and thought out film that makes for quite the disturbing experience. This film is clearly not for everyone as those that are sensitive to violence or are not a fan of avant-garde films will pretty much be turned off by this film in general. If this sounds like something you might enjoy though I highly recommend you check it out for yourself. It’s not playing in a lot of theaters at this point, but if you do run across this film then get ready for the most visually chaotic and terrifying bad trip you’ll ever take in a long time.

Final Verdict: 9/10