Film Review – Climax (2018)
It’s the mid-nineties and 20 young hip-hop hoofers coagulate in a remote building. Unfortunately, or not dependant on your disposition, some cheeky monkey has juiced up the communal sangria with weapons-grade hallucinogenics. Soon, the good-natured dance battles descend into the kind of nihilistic drug-crazed rampage that would have Dante asking Albert Camus if he was alright to drive him home.
Arising from the dangerworld of Gaspar Noé’s twisted imagination Climax is as close to a cinematic depiction of a bad acid trip as anyone should want to get. Shot in just 15 days the film opens with a sequence of candid interviews with the protagonists framed by stacks of infamous DVD’s on one side and literary hand grenades on the other. A cursory glance at their titles will tell you everything you need to know about the incoming barrage of head messing discombobulation. In typical Noé fashion, this is not for the purpose of cultural kudos….it’s a fucking warning.
Strap yourself in for a wild, wild ride as we visit such film musical perennials as unbridled incest, flaming scalps, feral masturbation, electrocuted tripping toddlers and hot piss on the dance floor.
In terms of his relentless mission to single-handedly trigger every being in the known universe, this is a comparatively tame offering from Mr Noé. However, in terms of an expression of artistic bravado that utterly refuses to betray its thunderous primal scream ethics, it is a stone-cold masterpiece of cine-literate abandon.
The 95 minutes runtime, it feels much longer in a narcotic kind of way, is chock full to the filthy, frothy brim with stylistic hot-dogging and aesthetic grandstanding. Extended dance sequences freewheel hypnotically into the sweltering embrace of giddy excess. The hyper-real titles rape the screen just at the exact moment the characters become inescapably ripped of their collective tits. The blistering soundtrack symphonies the hedonistic rollercoaster of debauchery before dissolving into the sweet catharsis of The Rolling Stones. And that’s just the tip of the creative iceberg as the movie sails tantalisingly close to art installation territory.
One deliciously pretentious title card insert declares “Life is a Collective Impossibility” – both a direct modernist footnote to Dante’s “Hell is other people” and a clear statement of intent of this epic film’s agenda.
See this blisteringly intense movie masterwork in a cinema as soon as you possibly can.
Bradley Hadcroft | [rating=5]
Musical, Horror, Drama | France, 2018 | 18 | Subtitles | 11th February 2019 (UK) | Arrow Video | Dir.Gaspar Noé | Sofia Boutella, Romain Guillermic, Souheila Yacoub.
This is a repost of 2018 Arrow Video FrightFest
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