Climax

We haven’t had a party gone wrong quite like this before. A brilliant one-shot musical intro, a few lines to get to know the characters and the party begins. For the participating unfortunates, a badly mixed sangria can work real magic. Climax is a super engaging acid trip. Out of Noé’s entire filmography, it is the most similar to Enter the Void, but this time taking place in a few rooms and one hallway. Dancing and frolicking, collective paranoia, hallucinogenic madness. The movie is tense and scary in places, but by Noé’s standards, it is quite restrained in terms of sex and violence. Four stars thanks to the festival atmosphere (or rather the constant hunger for innovative things), but otherwise it is just the same self-obsessed inanity with pseudo-philosophical insights as found in most of the director‘s filmography. [Cannes] (05/15/2018)

Aggressive, provocative, controversial and boundary-pushing, Gaspar Noe delivers his best work and it is once again an original, fresh and uncomfortably steamy spectacle. The film is even based on a true story, about thirty dancers finishing their American tour and intending to celebrate properly, but the evening goes awry when LSD is mixed into the Sangria and unfortunately not everyone makes it to the morning. This dance horror drug musical is one of a kind and compelling enough to keep you interested, though it's good to know the director's previous work beforehand so you have an idea of what you're getting into. The opening dance number is absolutely breathtaking and enthralling and the witty sex references suited me just fine, but once the party gets underway in full swing the hallucinogenic trippy ride begins, with everyone involved experiencing a nightmare you wouldn’t believe. There are a couple of uncomfortable scenes, though the violence is slightly skimped on, but it makes up for it with solid music, dance numbers, very racy girls, sex scenes and original cinematography with a filter at the end albeit too chaotic for some. Sofia Boutella rocks again and since I first saw her in Kingsman she has only surprised and shocked! Solid for me. 80%. (02/03/2019)

Gaspar Noé dances an extremely dirty dance, and with his help, this manages to entrance and fascinate you for quite some time. And yet during the excessively stretched-out dialogue, a feeling arose that someone was stretching me out. And that was before the anticipated barrage of purposeless violence and annoying antics accompanied by the spinning of the camera was even on the program, and the fact that the stubborn director refused to move from one spot even a little bit after so many years almost made me laugh. And I had already lost my patience with works presented to the clever audience long ago. (10/31/2018)

Almost every other better film critic has outlined a quick, more or less modest parallel between Bosch's depiction of Hell from the triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights" and the second part of Noé's film, i.e., the "horror" part. It would be a mistake, as every other critic does, to separate the first part (before things go wrong) and the second part of the film, just as it is impossible to separate the parts of the triptych. Here, we can rely on the idea that was expressed in Jean Eustache's film about Bosch's Hell: "I really feel that it is in the third painting, in the description of Hell, where Bosch finally lets himself go. He lets himself be carried away by the description of pleasure, senseless and complete. This pleasure is so complete that even its consciousness is not present." If the relationship between painful pleasure and the attractiveness of terror is only a conscious contradiction, while at the level of the unconscious, it is the desired goal of the death urge, towards which we willingly walk with joyful tears of horror immediately after LSD disables our social inhibitors, it is a possibility that Noé does not precisely examine - he only shows it. That is his classic position for me: a mixture of shallowness and a desire for depth. Fortunately, we already know that contradictions are not mutually exclusive, but collide with each other, so it is not possible to give up on Noé's work for such reasons, just as Bosch also had a troubled relationship with perspective and, therefore, with the depth of the field; criticizing Noé for shallowness would be nothing more than bourgeois attachment to the conscious sphere of film. (02/28/2021)

The best dance film since Dirty Dancing! The cinematography is just incredible. The camera revolves around the characters, makes long zoom-ins, somersaults and flips, crawls upside-down, peers down vertically… until you start feeling dizzy. Noé playfully makes fun of the viewer, for example with the end credits not being at the end at all, or by the means of editing – at some point, you get insanely long scenes in a single take, to then better contrast with a succession of short scenes and a generous amount of really eye-catching and aggressive cuts. In short, the structure of this film is totally polymorphic and completely deviates from the established conventions. And, certainly as Noé intended, Climax has the ability to enthral, entertain, disgust, disturb and frighten the viewer. [KVIFF 2018] (07/06/2018)