Climax

Many people I know love this film, so I apologise to them beforehand. I suffered. A totally empty camera exhibtion that if it wasn’t for the titles nobody would have a clue as to what it is supposed to be about. The staging must have been hard, there’s no doubt about that, but that’s pretty much all I can praise. If you played only the soundtrack to someone, they would sue you for personal injuries, and this is the very aggressive and shallow way Noe tries to achieve the depression and exhaustion of the audience, also in purely visual terms. And I don’t see anything praise-worthy about that, because other than fuck-all, the only thing I can take from this is that Boutella has wonderful shape and movements and that in the next party I will drink my beer from MY own glass. I’m afraid that this is my first and also last film by Noé. (02/27/2019)

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)

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)

Watching Gaspar Noé's films is like discovering new forms of communication. The opening dance scene is hypnotic perfection and pure ecstasy, while everything else is mainly about how far you are willing to go and how far your spectator endurance reaches. A spectacular cameraman show and epileptic choreography accompanied by techno on a trip; or in other words, Noé knows how to mix a tailor-made sangria. He collected his most frequent trademarks, scattered them at a dance party and purposefully created a hallucinogenic apocalypse with zero plot, but maximum efficiency. A wild and predatory experimental ride, incredibly progressive and, at the same time, narcissistically immersed in itself. But what else would you expect from Noé? (07/06/2018)

Engaging provocation by Noé which to a great extent tests the endurance and patience of the viewer. I’m not sure I would want to watch it at home on the PC, but in the main theatre of Hotel Thermal, at the KVIFF, thumbs up. Already at the beginning, when Noé serves the closing scene and the opening credits of the film that is about to follow, it is clear that this is not something that plays strictly by the rules. The dancing number at the beginning is brilliant. The following garrulous passage lost me, but then Climax got me back once the Sangría with LSD started to hit. The last half hour is a stress test for the senses of the viewer; a descent into utter darkness and a state of altered consciousness that made my head spin. The experience, in the strict sense of the word, is pleasant, but heavy. (08/15/2018)