Climax doesn’t have characters as much as it does human bodies – vessels for emotion and inescapable dread, overwhelmingly expressive audiovisual props to convey Gaspar Noé’s latest nightmares about the psychological abysses of existence. The figures onscreen try to ascend their human form by channeling themselves into dance, only to be reminded of their fragility in the film’s second half, where their yearning for loss of control descends into a drug-infused struggle for existence. With Climax, Noé orchestrates a primal rise-and-fall experience that revels in the overlap of the orgasmic and mental torment. Where people drag you into depths of pain, suffering and helplessness you wouldn’t have minded leaving unexplored, while the rhythmic pulses of the soundtrack and the unflinching camera trap you in the psyche of a group of people simultaneously having the worst and most transcendent night of their lives.
I don’t imagine Roger Ebert having had a film in the vein of Climax in mind when he described the medium as an empathy machine. But the sense of inescapable dread, of alternating and amalgamating paranoia and satisfaction that creeps deep into your bones while watching the film is among the most visceral examples of Ebert’s claim there is. The people in Climax are characters, at least that’s what they start off as. With names, different personalities and goals. The film even starts with a montage of interview clips shown on a CRT screen, where they are given the opportunity to introduce themselves for a few minutes before the soundtrack and the bombastic, twelve-minute opening shot take over. Before they become pawns of a fever-dream. As soon as Noé’s camera starts gliding and flying through the abandoned school the film takes place in, the characters turn into affecting bodies. Their backstories and traits get engulfed by their ghastly faces and contorting limbs. We don’t emphasize with them because they are well-realized characters. We emphasize with them because, when we see people in agony and hear screams of desperation, our bodies mimic what we perceive. It is a primal, a fundamental layer of empathy only movies are capable of producing.
Noé is famous for delving into this primally affecting quality of film to create experiences that etch themselves deeper into your brain than you probably want them to. Though Climax reaches new levels of mental intrusion in that regard. The setup is as simple as it is effective: A group of dancers celebrate their final night of rehearsing with party music, dancing and booze, only to find out the sangria they’ve been drinking has been spiked with LSD. Besides two of the most demanding roles, Noé has exclusively cast dancers with no prior acting experience, with the camera eager to capture the different statures and styles of performative expression they bring to the film. It captures them talking about their sexual, romantic and protective impulses in static set-ups, flies into the air to deliver perspectives of bodies in movement that stay with you, or, during the one continuous shot that makes up virtually the entire second half of the film, follows the characters in never-ending tracking shots through claustrophobic hallways deep into the darkest corners of their psyche. The lack of montage there brings with it an unnerving feeling of entrapment, as you start to internalize that no matter how cruel the situations that Noé puts his characters in, he isn’t going to cut away.
Despite being structured into several distinct acts, uniquely separated both by the film’s plot and the contrasting styles of camerawork, Climax flows through its 96 minutes in hypnotizing fashion. Which is not to say Noé does away with self-indulgence in the slightest. The entire film is an exercise in extending and escalating every aspect until far beyond any breaking point. But the perceived surreality of it all binds the film together. The pulse of the omnipresent music lets your mind wander to uncomfortable places while people lose themselves in its rhythm for minutes on end on the screen in front of you, the sickish neon reds and greens turn the empty hallways of the school into hellish mazes where the drugged dancers lose their minds in, piece by piece. Noé shot the film in chronological order, with improvisation and on-the-spot decision-making shaping large parts of the plot and the dialog. Which helps give the loss of control that dominates the film’s second half a natural sense of continuous and unpredictable escalation. When shit hits the fan in such cruel, panicking and sadistic ways that only Noé could conjure up and the unrelenting music and cries of excruciation blend together into a disturbing soundscape, any hopes to create some emotional distance from the unfolding nightmare are long gone.
The question that remains – the one that, as in most of Noé’s films, everybody has to answer for themselves – is the why of it all. Climax follows its characters into the abyss, where impulsive thought, drug-infused paralysis and a twisted self-awareness merge into a whole new kind of monster. And it makes sure to take you along for its mind-bending ride, from the electric dynamism of its first half to the horrors of its second. The tilted tracking shots edge themselves into your brain with unnerving precision. But what do they elicit once they are in there? There is no thematic underbelly to guide the film’s power into a specific direction after its shock has faded, it leaves it up to you how to deal with the aftermath. Noé is searching for existential and human feelings and perspectives that go beyond theme. There is no truth to be found beyond its experience. Climax exists because it can, its unrelenting indulgence is its substance. Its individual acts are bookmarked by such quotes as “Life is a collective impossibility” and “Death is an extraordinary experience.” Statements so existential they inhabit the space where vacuousness and meaning melt into one.
The interview scene at the beginning has books by Kafka and about Nietzsche and Fritz Lang as well as VHS-tapes of films such as Possession, Suspiria and Eraserhead right and left of the TV as indications of Noé’s unflinching nightmare to come. It leads into a shot of the French flag, with a title card introducing Climax as a film that is “proud to be French.” Only for two characters shortly after to complain about said flag, claiming it makes them feel watched. As the already fragile group-dynamic further disintegrates over the course of the film, the French colors remain unchanged and always looming in the background. Noé weaves a discussion about French identity into the heart of Climax, though he leaves it buried deep within. This detail doesn’t help to put its depiction of self-harm, of suicide, of incest and of nerve-wrecking mental breakdowns into any new contexts. They remain tools to create the experience Noé wants Climax to be. It greatly depends on each person whether these tools are effective, whether the experience Climax provides is something that benefits the person in any way. I caught myself feeling uncomfortably voyeuristic while watching people suffer with such excess and detail, which came across more exploitative than anything. It is wild that Climax exists, it is wildly impressive how it turned out, but the film also deliberately dodges any responsibility as to where to channel its hypnotic experience once it fades to white.
Thank you for reading <3