Movie Review: "Climax" Is a Dance Dance Revelation

Climax, one of the best films of the year, is a living nightmare. With dance breaks.

From the first minute of director Gaspar Noé’s pictures (like the backward and bloody Irreversible, immersive afterlife experience Enter the Void and 3-D sexfest Love) you know what you’re in for.

By minute five, saner viewers may begin questioning the life decisions that led them to the theatre. By minute 90, ushers are usually summoning paramedics (or priests) to attend to the survivors.

Gaspar Noé doesn’t just inspire walk-outs. He turns cinemas into escape rooms.

However, some people like having their melons twisted and their senses tingled by a provocateur. I am one of those people. And that’s what Climax—his latest and, this is hilarious to even say aloud, somehow most accessible project—does. It’s the most cohesive thing he’s ever made, as well as the most viscerally entertaining. His camera also spends lengthy periods facing the wrong way up. Even if you’re down to clown with Climax, you should bring some Aspirin for the inevitable hangover.

The feature opens with a bloodied woman crawling across a snowy expanse. A title screen informs us the movie we’ve seen (note the tense) was based on a true story from 1996. (It isn’t, or rather, wasn’t.) Then the credits roll. And then we’re treated to talking head interviews with a variety of French and German dancers. The camera is trained on a TV playing the banal auditions for a dance troupe, but a pile of sordid VHS tapes next to the tele indicate where this tale is heading: Suspiria, Un Chien Andalou, Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom are stacked as influences. If you heed the warning and leave now, Noé wins anyway, because this time, technically, you stayed past the end credits.

Besides, if you leave now, you’ll miss the most electrifying sequence of 2018, as the dancers—led by lone familiar face, Sofia Boutella—perform an acrobatic, all-strutting dance to Cerrone’s "Supernature", choreographed by Nina McNeely. It goes for five minutes. I would have accepted 80 more. Noé, though, has other stuff he needs to get to. You’ll want to have finished your Choc Top by then.

After perfecting the routine—following three days of rehearsal, we learn—the performers unwind with an afterparty that involves copious flirtation, sangria and, most ominously, a child. The camera—conducted by cinematographer Benoît Debie—sits static for a bit, and Noé cuts to different pairings of dancers as they gossip and start placing dibs on one another. Before long, the camera returns to life, woozily wandering the dancefloor as it becomes increasingly apparent the sangria has been spiked, and everyone starts collectively losing their s*** (while still dancing). Their setting: an abandoned school that may not have been haunted when the night started, but will be by the end.

Climax, in many ways, is like one of the nightmarish clubs Stefon describes on SNL, because this thing has everything, including, quite literally, a woman with nowhere to turn. (Tbh, a few of them.) The mania engulfs the dancers, who spiral into violence, self-harm, immolation and a few other things I don’t feel comfortable articulating in writing, for fear of setting off your internet blockers. The flashing neon strobes become guiding lights to their new hellish existence; the music, its siren song. Boutella, in a wild moment of hysteria, does the best 'angry ballet' since Kevin Bacon in Footloose. As the desperate, regretful mother hen Selva, she gives one of the year’s best turns, and the only one I can remember that also involves scream-krumping to Aphex Twin’s "Windowlicker".

You have to wonder what it’s all about. There are some intertitles offered as clues, suggesting "life is a collective impossibility", not to mention an opening declaration that calls Climax "French... and proud of it," even though that proves to be tongue-in-cheek as the madness rolls on. (A sequined French flag remains the imposing backdrop to events).

You’re tempted to imagine it's making a troubling comment on European multiculturalism, until you learn the flick was mostly improvised and executed over three weeks, with the dancers-turned-amateur-actors allowed to invent their characters. And you want to chide Noé for indulging his worst impulses, like having seizure-inducing credits continually interrupt proceeding, and making the chaotic ending (even by the rest of the film’s insane standards) almost impossible to watch.

Yet Climax is alive and unique and absolutely bonkers. It’s cinema used as a tool to provoke and tickle pleasure centers at once. If it wasn’t for the nausea, I’d have watched it twice through.

4.5/5

In select Australian cinemas 6 December (Cinema Nova, Melbourne; Dendy Newtown, Sydney; Newfarm Cinema, Brisbane; Luna Leederville, Perth). Rated MA15+ for strong themes, drug use, sex and coarse language.