Climax Review: Disco Inferno

A24

All hell break dances loose in writer/director Gaspar Noé’s latest offering, Climax.

Climax is trippy, chaotic, sexual performance art - set to an urban/electronica beat, all within the confines of an abandoned school building, located in a pocket of desolate wilderness in 90s France.

Complete with long takes that follow characters from room to room - the entire film feels like one long indie music video that would only air at 3 in the morning.

After the opening sequence, which showcases a bloodied woman crawling for her life across a seemingly infinite snowscape; the film gets as normal as it’s ever going to get.

First, displaying a series of interviews with excited, optimistic dancers; and then showcasing said dancers rehearsing a new routine, to celebratory results.

The dialogue immediately following the routine is explicitly sexual, but it’s not totally out of the ordinary for young people, still on a performance high (and an actual high), to talk openly and shamelessly about various sexual acts with people they consider to be their friends.

This introduction to the characters and the dialogue between them opens up themes of diversity, gender fluidity, and sexual liberation.

It’s a moment that speaks to both everything and nothing, all at once.

On one hand, it can be seen as the celebration of self-expression and identity, but it can also just be about characters simply talking about sex to fill the void.

But once the (acid-spiked) drinks start flowing, things take a turn for the worse.

It devolves into something I can only describe as what far right wingers probably envision when they have horrific nightmares about how liberals spend their free time.

And once again, this everything-and-nothing concept is played out for the audience.

The spiked drinks lead to the characters making decisions based entirely on their most primitive desires. They either want to fight or fuck, with no daylight in between the two.

Driven solely by their id, the characters get territorial, tribal, primal, sexual, and violent; sometimes all at once, and it can either be seen as social commentary on the state of humanity, or simply just wild characters doing wild things.

There are moments in the film that feel topical, and genuinely come across as Noé trying to make a statement about something - most notably, the scenes in which the entire dancehall resorts to the groupthink of an angry mob, and targets specific individuals with shaming (all the way down to the “Kill yourself!” chants), and outright banishment -figuratively and literally throwing someone out into the cold.

It felt like commentary on the weaponization of social media, and how much damage it can do to any one target if enough people join in on the outrage. Something that may hit close to home for Noé, whose 2002 film Irreversible is routinely considered one of the most disturbing films of all time, and has caught significant heat from critics and moviegoers alike, in particular for its 9-minute-long rape scene.

The atmosphere in Climax is decidedly ominous, and consistently macabre. Make no mistake - this is Hell.

The main dance floor gets redder in color, and darker in content, with every reentrance by a character. The mortified screams coming from outside the room echo, and ultimately morph into the beats, until they’re no longer discernible, and instead become part of the instrumental itself.

The entire third act is confusing, jarring, and tumultuous; but at the same time, an organized chaos. Not unlike a choreographed dance routine.

And much like dance itself, this film is open to interpretation.