Gaspar Noé’s Climax is a 97-minute fever dream about a dance troupe whose after-party goes wrong. It is a horror film, a drama, and a musical experiment, all at once, and it mostly earns its ambition. The film follows a French dance company lured to an abandoned school for a final rehearsal. They drink sangria spiked with LSD, and chaos follows. Noé lets it run.
Trailer, via A24.
The Party Turns
The premise is simple: a group of dancers celebrate their final rehearsal with a shared bowl of sangria. Someone spikes it. The film watches as the group loses control, accuses each other, and falls apart. Selva, played by Sofia Boutella, leads the troupe. David, Lou, Daddy, and the rest of the cast are mostly dancers with no acting experience, and Noé shot the film in 15 days, largely unrehearsed.
Boutella and Yacoub
Boutella is the standout. She plays Selva with a cool, controlled presence that cracks under pressure. Souheila Yacoub, as Lou, is equally effective, and her breakdown is the film’s emotional center. Noé found Boutella in ballrooms and krump battles, and Yacoub through an agent who suggested a dancer who could scream and dance on demand. The ensemble chemistry holds even when the story fragments.
Long Takes and Chaos
Noé’s technique is the film’s defining feature. Long takes run for minutes at a time, capturing the dancers moving through space without cutting. This creates a sense of dread and confusion that fits the material, though it can stretch patience during quieter stretches. The editing is deliberately jumbled, mirroring the characters’ scrambled minds.
A Mess Worth Watching
Climax is not a polished picture. It is messy, loud, and often unclear. Noé is more interested in the feeling of disintegration than in explaining it, and that approach will frustrate some viewers. The film’s central mystery — who spiked the sangria — is left unresolved, which feels less like a deliberate choice and more like a structural failure.
But the film’s strengths are real. The cast improvised their lines on the spot, with no dialogue provided beforehand, and almost complete liberty to direct the story as they saw fit. The dance sequences, shot in long takes, are part of that chaos. The film is at its best when it trusts its own instincts, letting the dancers improvise within Noé’s framework.
The Facts
- Title: Climax (2018)
- Director: Gaspar Noé
- Runtime: 97 minutes
Climax is a bold, uneven film that rewards attention. It is not a perfect one, but it is a memorable one. The technical ambition is real, and the cast’s improvisation carries it through its rough patches.
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