Climax, Gaspar Noe (2018)

Climax (Gaspar Noe, 2018) allures its audience with its dangerous and sexually charged title. One might be expecting that the film will fulfill the promise of its title with a satisfying climax perhaps at the end of the film but in fact we find ourselves trapped in a perpetual orgasm that never releases its tension. Noe is bolder than he’s ever been before with this film, even perhaps than the controversially disturbing Irreversible. He is certainly more raw and more visceral than any director on the indie scene today; he has created his own horror sub-genre- that of “fucking-with-your-head-horror”, and Climax may be the most effective attempt yet.

Noe’s pacing is perfectly spine-chilling as any degradation into madness should be. He opens with a terrifying display of a bloodied woman crawling through the snow, shot from birds-eye view which disorientates the viewer and sets off a “just wait for it” mind-set which will haunt us for the first hour of the film. This is then followed by retro styled vox-pop interviews with our dancers; an eccentric lot all seeming to have some sort of vice.

Then we are invited into the weird and wonderful world of their dance practice. Brimming with energy and kitsch and half naked displays, the characters dance almost ritualistically as if they are summoning something or other. Without the warning of what’s coming from the opening of the film, you might think the dancing is merely progressive and avant-garde. Noe, though, twists and turns the camera upside down and round and round in hypnotic disillusionment and the dancing begins to become difficult to watch.

The characters pair off and the camera looms around listening to the resentments they hold for one another, or jealousy or sexual interest. One particularly disturbing conversation centres around two men competitively one upping each other on how crude and aggressively they can joke about having sex with the female dancers. One character then says what the audience are thinking, that these people are weird and something doesn’t seem right. With the backdrop of saturated reds and pinks and purples and pulsing beat and close proximity shots and claustrophobic set, Noe only ravels us up more into this equally alluring and weird world.

This all goes on for quite a while. I remember thinking after the first hour and 10, so are things actually going to get really bad or not, and then feeling dissatisfied that it was possible I wasn’t going to get the crazy Thanatos fix I was expecting from Noe. Not long after I thought this, did then the words “be careful what you ask for” ever feel more appropriate. And so the descension into what I would call a psychedelic panic attack, takes hold.

Sofie Boutella leads us back and forth from the horrific display of chaos in the main hall to the secret ultraviolet dark rooms in the back where secrets and resentments seem to manifest into ugly encounters. One woman, blamed for spiking the drinks, after just confessing she is pregnant gets kicked in the stomach and later rages out into the main hall slashing her body with a knife as the others shame and laugh at her. A son of one of the dancers, manages to drink some of the devil potion and his mother locks him in the electricity room to protect him, only for him to meet a horrible fate. I begin to wish this would all be over sooner rather than later. But I watch on as a voyeur on a journey into the heart of darkness.

Sofie Boutelle’s talent is truly conveyed through a freaky display when she discovers the curious contraption of her tights, reaching her hands inside and then suddenly becoming mentally trapped. As she tries to push her hands out, she becomes increasingly horrified and throws herself around the room where the viewer feels her frustration and melancholy for the horribly ineffable intangible situation she is in. The images appeal to the visceral hunger pangs of the reptilian brain despite how much it makes you want to cringe.

Noe’s use of inter-titles can be perceived from two angles; as cheap pseudo-philosophical proclamations or the perplexing screams deriving from the uncanny (a place where the simultaneously familiar and beyond real meet). “LIFE IS A COLLECTIVE IMPOSSIBILITY”. I experienced these inter-titles not as “meta” assertions made by the auteur but the very surreal paranoiac secretions of the psychotic mind. They were words coming from the minds of the dancers. But, as is the work of the uncanny, and what truly scares the shit out of the viewer, is the idea that there’s something real or beyond real in this assertion. That the brain is such a complex thing and perfectly translates the continuity of being through such complex processes, makes me wonder what the world would look like without such an advanced machine. Without cognitive stability or indeed consciousness (which seems to be what the dancers are gradually sublimating) what is life, in all its rawness? An impossibility? From a more basic perspective, if nothing else, the film scares us into realizing the horrific capabilities of the psychedelics and the human brain.