IMDb plot summary: French dancers gather in a remote, empty school building to rehearse on a wintry night. The all-night celebration morphs into a hallucinatory nightmare when they learn their sangria is laced with LSD.
Directed by Gaspar Noé. Starring Sofia Boutella, Romain Guillermic, and Souheila Yacoub.
Climax is a film by Gaspar Noé about a group of dancers at a party who inadvertently drink acid-spiked sangria and end up having a very, very, very bad collective trip. I had very low expectations for this film, given how much I disliked Enter the Void, but this one kind of worked for me. It is terrifying and claustrophobic and all the more unsettling from the audience vantage point as an outsider -- we're never put inside the minds of any of these characters, so all we see is their erratic behavior consistently escalating to nightmarish levels, without any ability to help them or for them to help each other. I think it benefits from its short runtime, at right around 90 minutes, which keeps the horror fresh instead of ever allowing it to settle. The first half, before the terror sets in, is also surprisingly engaging, setting the scene for all these characters' interactions and featuring really fantastic dance sequences. The film hired real dancers instead of actors, and while that may work against it sometimes, for the most part it works, as movement is such a core component of the horror of all of this. Not one I'd like to revisit any time soon or anything -- it's a lot -- but I was impressed by it.
How it entered my Flickchart:
Climax > Love Exposure
Climax < Safe
Climax > Kajaki
Climax < All the Best: Fun Begins
Climax > Air
Climax < The Pirate Movie
Climax > Moonlight
Climax < Educating Rita
Climax > Prometheus
Climax < The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Climax > The Crying Game
Final spot: #1315 out of 3931, or 67%.
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