Who spiked the punch? That’s the question Gaspar Noé’s 2018 psychedelic horror film, Climax 2018, is determined to find out. The only problem is everybody’s hysterical, horny, and high out of their minds.
If you’re not familiar with Gaspar Noé, he’s an Argentinian director known for his bold, almost confrontational style of filmmaking — and Climax 2018 is perhaps the peak of this transgressiveness. Lacking many of the typical tropes (jump scares, eerie music, gore, an established villain/killer), it’s a very particular type of horror most people wouldn’t initially associate with the genre, but terrifying nonetheless.
In a way, Climax rides the coattails of the “elevated” horror blockbusters of that era, vaguely reminiscent of the more psychologically focused films like Get Out and Midsommar that defined the late 2010s. And although I find both movies unsettling, Peele and Aster’s attempts to disturb come off as lukewarm compared to Noé. I’d be hard-pressed to spend even five minutes in that man’s brain.
How the opening scene sets the tone
So let’s talk about what sets Climax apart, and why you should watch it if you’re a fan of the more avant-garde. Set in 1996, the movie begins with about fifteen minutes of (audition?) tape footage from a collection of dancers rehearsing a group number in an abandoned warehouse. These young provocateurs (whose names aren’t really important, since there are so many of them) introduce themselves to the viewer before the camera cuts to the number they’ve been working on.
Here, we get the first glimpse of this movie’s true atmosphere. The dance number is more like an art piece than anything else, in the sense that you almost forget you’re watching human beings. The way these dancers undulate to this almost hypnotic, synthpop club mix for over five uninterrupted minutes is exhausting to watch. They mosh, grind, and contort their bodies in ways that seem near-impossible, all while the camera hovers over them from a bird’s-eye view angle.
There are no lulls in the routine. Nobody takes a break. These dancers are athletes, extremists, deadly serious about their craft and determined to put on a spectacle. When the routine finally ends (which feels like an eon later), everyone celebrates by drinking sangria spiked with a hallucinogen.
That’s when the fun stops, and the horror begins.
Climax 2018 is a bad trip that just keeps getting worse
From the jump, Climax is one nightmarish sequence after another, and I mean that in a very literal sense. It feels like a lucid translation of a bad dream you can’t escape because you’re not in control of when your body wakes — and that loss of control is why this movie frightens me. Whether you like it or not, you’re trapped in this warehouse with the dancers, forced to bear witness to the gruesome events that follow.
Fun fact: I first watched Climax last October and had to Google whether the whole film is one continuous shot prior to writing this review. Although there are scene breaks, it certainly doesn’t feel like it.
Before the acid kicks in, Noé establishes camaraderie amongst the troupe by introducing us to each dancer in a more organic setting (as opposed to the on-camera persona we see in the beginning). Now we’re like flies on the wall, listening in on snippets of conversation between the characters and getting a better sense of the dynamic they have with their teammates. Some goof off like old friends, others confess intimate secrets, pass on gossip, wax poetic, and so on.
Everyone gets along swimmingly… but once they realize they’ve all been drugged, the dancers accuse each other of spiking the punch bowl. At first, they collectively blame the dance manager, Emmanuelle, because she was the one who made the sangria — but this theory dissolves once they realize her young son, Tito, is also under the influence. So then, who could it be? Lou, the only dancer who didn’t sample the punch because she’s pregnant? With so much finger-pointing going on, animosity brews quickly and mounts even faster as the effects of the acid take hold.
Over the course of the next hour, we watch helplessly as the dancers grow violent and turn on each other, possessed by paranoia that permeates throughout the group. If you’re wondering how disastrous things get, I’ll give you a rundown of some of the drug-induced incidents that occur:
- Emmanuelle locks Tito inside an electrical room to safeguard him from any danger, but loses the keys in her drug-addled state and can’t get inside to pacify his screaming.
- A man named Dom rebukes Lou’s insistence that she didn’t spike the punch and kicks her repeatedly in the stomach to prove she isn’t pregnant. Other dancers join in, encouraging Lou to kill herself. She is eventually goaded into various forms of self-harm.
- Two friends fight over cocaine, and one of them pushes the other into a portable stove, setting her hair on fire. This causes an electrical malfunction and subsequently fries Tito to death.
- A man named David is brutally beaten for crudely stating he wants to have sex with every woman in the dance troupe. Retreating into a dressing room for safety, he catches two siblings engaging in incestuous activity.
- The sister in the incest, Gazelle, frantically runs into the main rehearsal room and has a seizure on the floor whilst her fellow dancers are too busy having sex or assaulting one another to notice.
Keep in mind that these are only the main plot points.
Waking up in a cold sweat
I’ve often joked to people that I love movies that follow the premise of “guy has the worst night of his life,” often citing Martin Scorsese’s After Hours as the quintessential example. But whereas Scorsese’s film is more of a quirky black comedy, Climax is the most gruesome iteration of this concept.
So who spiked the punch in the end? If you’re interested in seeing the film, I won’t spoil the big reveal, but I will note that the movie concludes with another long aerial shot of the warehouse the morning after the rehearsal. At this point the police have arrived and are investigating the scene.
Before the credits roll, the camera flips upside-down and idles on the culprit, who is shown dancing alone in the warehouse, completely unfazed by the pandemonium they caused. The shot is protracted, voyeuristic in a way, and only gives us a reprieve in the final few seconds. Here, we glimpse the culprit’s bag, revealing they own several books on hallucinogenics, before they lope off and drop another dose of acid into their eye.
Dance ‘til you’re dead: Climax (2018) is French cinema...
Director: Gaspar Noe
Date Created: 2018-05-13 23:00
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