Welcome to the End of the World, Set to a Sick Beat
Gaspar Noé’s Climax opens like a fever dream and ends like a stomach flu. Between those points lies 96 minutes of French dancers screaming, convulsing, and doing things to each other that make you question both art and the legality of filming such chaos without a priest present.
The premise sounds promising: a group of dancers, a bowl of sangria, and a dash of LSD. Think Step Up meets Requiem for a Dream. Unfortunately, what we actually get is Step Off and Die Confused.
Noé’s camera swirls, the bass throbs, and you—dear viewer—slowly lose your will to live somewhere between the seventh seizure and the tenth interpretive breakdown. It’s less a film and more a hostage situation with choreography.
The Plot (Or, How I Learned to Stop Caring and Fear the Beat)
It’s 1996. A French dance troupe is rehearsing in an abandoned school, because apparently every school in France doubles as a future crime scene. They finish their big number—a mix of breakdancing, voguing, and what looks like aggressive CPR—and decide to celebrate with sangria.
Then someone spikes it with LSD, and everything goes straight to hell.
People accuse each other. People scream. People crawl. Someone sets their hair on fire. There’s incest, murder, and interpretive writhing. The lighting turns blood red, and the camera starts spinning like it just chugged a bottle of NyQuil.
By the time the police show up, the building looks like an experimental art installation titled “Bad Trip: A Study in How Not to Party.”
Gaspar Noé: The Patron Saint of Psychological Torture
Gaspar Noé has always loved making movies that feel like endurance tests. Enter the Void made you dizzy. Irreversiblemade you traumatized. Love made you wish for blindness. Climax combines all three sensations and adds club lighting.
To his credit, Noé knows how to provoke. The first twenty minutes are genuinely hypnotic—an electrifying dance sequence filmed in one long take that practically vibrates off the screen. For a brief moment, you think, “Wow, this might actually be brilliant.”
Then everyone starts drinking, and Noé remembers he hates his audience.
The LSD Takes Hold, and So Does the Nausea
Once the drugs kick in, Climax abandons all pretense of structure and becomes a cinematic panic attack. The camera flips upside down for ten solid minutes, as if Noé wants to simulate both the high and the migraine.
Characters scream for no reason. Someone licks the floor. Someone else punches a pregnant woman. And throughout it all, the soundtrack keeps thumping like a demonic rave sponsored by Satan’s Spotify account.
The cinematography is technically impressive but spiritually exhausting. Every frame screams “LOOK AT ME, I’M ART,” while the plot quietly dies in the corner. It’s like watching a brilliant painter smear ketchup on a canvas while yelling about Nietzsche.
The Characters: Beautiful, Talented, and Completely Insufferable
Noé cast real dancers instead of actors, which gives the film its kinetic energy—and also ensures nobody knows how to deliver a line without sounding like they’re reading IKEA instructions during a meltdown.
Sofia Boutella (Kingsman, The Mummy) is the lone professional actor, playing Selva, the troupe’s choreographer and the only person who seems mildly concerned about the apocalypse unfolding around her. Boutella does her best, but it’s like watching a ballerina stranded in a mosh pit.
The rest of the cast spends the film sweating, screaming, and hurling insults that may or may not have been improvised. Given that Noé gave them no script, it’s entirely possible they’re just begging for someone to call cut.
The Dialogue: Mostly Screaming, Occasionally Worse
Improvisation can yield brilliance. It can also yield Climax.
The dancers discuss drugs, sex, and existentialism in the way high school students discuss politics after one joint—loudly, incoherently, and with total confidence that they’re profound.
Lines like “You can’t dance without desire!” land with all the subtlety of a brick to the forehead. After an hour, you start longing for subtitles that just say “[incoherent suffering].”
The LSD Trip: Sponsored by Vertigo and Poor Life Choices
Once the sangria takes effect, Noé transforms the film into a kaleidoscopic nightmare. The camera roams the hallways like it’s drunk, spinning endlessly as the lighting switches between seizure-inducing red and melancholy green.
It’s meant to be immersive, and it is—if you define “immersive” as “I can feel my soul trying to escape through my eyes.”
Characters wander in and out of focus, their breakdowns blending into one long, sweaty orgy of despair. It’s both technically astonishing and narratively meaningless—a visual masterpiece built on a foundation of gibberish.
Watching Climax feels like being trapped inside someone else’s bad trip. You can’t help them, you can’t escape, and eventually, you just start humming along to the soundtrack out of survival instinct.
The Ending: Everyone Dies, Including Your Enthusiasm
By the time dawn arrives, most of the cast is dead, insane, or both. One dancer electrocuted her own child. Another slashed herself to ribbons. Someone’s still dancing, someone’s still sobbing, and you—dear viewer—are still trying to figure out why you paid to watch this.
Then the police show up, because apparently, France has the slowest emergency response in cinematic history. They find the corpses, the chaos, and a lone dancer still moving to the beat like a post-apocalyptic screensaver.
It’s supposed to be haunting. It’s mostly just confusing.
The “Message”: Life Is a Trip, and Then You Vomit
Critics love to talk about Climax as a metaphor for the human condition—an exploration of chaos, primal instinct, and the fragility of sanity. That’s one interpretation. Another is that Gaspar Noé wanted to make a 96-minute music video about regret and lost shoes.
If there’s a deeper meaning, it’s buried under layers of sweat and strobe lighting. Maybe it’s about artistic freedom. Maybe it’s about control. Maybe it’s about not trusting free drinks at a French dance rehearsal.
Whatever it is, Noé never lets us in on the secret. He just spins the camera faster until you stop asking questions.
Technical Achievement, Emotional Bankruptcy
Let’s give credit where it’s due: Climax is beautifully shot, meticulously choreographed, and edited with manic precision. The opening credits sequence—placed twenty minutes into the film, because of course—is stylish and inventive.
But once the shock wears off, you realize there’s nothing underneath. It’s like being handed a Fabergé egg only to discover it’s filled with mayonnaise.
The film mistakes motion for meaning, noise for emotion, and suffering for substance. By the end, it’s not the LSD that’s disorienting—it’s the realization that you’ve been watching nothing for an hour and a half.
Final Thoughts: Gaspar Noé’s Dance of Death (and Dullness)
Climax wants to be transcendent. It ends up being a migraine in 4K.
It’s not entirely without merit—the first act is electrifying, and the choreography is jaw-dropping—but once the LSD kicks in, the movie becomes the cinematic equivalent of someone screaming “THIS IS ART!” while setting themselves on fire.
You’ll leave the film feeling dazed, exhausted, and slightly ashamed that you ever doubted D.A.R.E. programs. It’s a film that proves sometimes the best climax is the one that never happens.
Final Rating: ★★☆☆☆
(Two out of five spiked sangrias — one star for Sofia Boutella’s sheer commitment, and one for the reminder to never attend a dance party hosted by Gaspar Noé.)
