The Movie Room

Climax 2018, directed by Gaspar Noé

Rating: 10/10

The first time I watched this movie, I went in with no idea what to expect. I now watch it at least once a year usually and I still have no idea how to feel about it, but it always just leaves me in awe. It’s terrifying and audacious and beautiful and gross and disturbing and frenetic and breathless and all I know is that though maybe I shouldn’t, I love it.

Part of this movie’s audaciousness is the way that it is structured. It begins at the end, with a lone figure crawling out in the snow and we are told that the movie we just watched was based off a true story that happened in the 1990s, and then we watch the end credits. Once the end credits stop, we are shown recordings of interviews done with dancers about why they should be part of this performance troupe, and surrounding the TV screen are VHS titles such as Suspiria—reinforcing the idea of dance but also bringing in the idea that maybe there is a darker purpose here like the demon-run dancing school of that film. We then watch as the dancers celebrate and dance—the dances being some of the best I have ever seen put on film. After they dance, we see them paired off having conversations while drinking sangria and we get a sense of who these individuals are and what the relationships they have formed are like and it allows us to both become accustomed to our characters and also feel like we are involved with them as we are privy to their gossip. Then, after 46 minutes, we get the title screen and the opening credits. Once that is done, the next 50ish minutes are just total chaos as the dance celebration descends into madness and leads to that lone bloody figure in the beginning, before a haunting final moment. I love narrative trickery, and the way this movie plays with its credits and how it organizes its scenes is very fascinating to me—it unnerves and unsettles the audience from the very start, which is great preparation for what happens at the party.

This is definitely not a movie for the faint-hearted. As the accidentally ingested drugs start taking effect, any and all boundaries are about to be smashed. All of the conversations we had seen previously had planted seeds, and the LSD-infused water makes them grow into monstrous plants. The couples who were just looking for fun and meaningless sex may get that, but it takes more out of them than they imagined. The brother who was over-protective of his little sister while he was sober takes his brotherly devotion too far. The mother who only wanted to protect her little child makes increasingly bad decisions trying to achieve this goal. Those who were already experimenting with drugs (most of them) now have new combinations going on in their body chemistry. For the most part, there is no singular monster here making this a horror film—it is fully a situational horror. Every single person in attendance at this party becomes a horror film monster once they have been spiked. The last fifty minutes of this movie is essentially what would happen if a large group of slashers were all locked into a school gymnasium together and let loose on each other. Freddy vs. Jason was one thing—this is that to a much more multitudinous degree.

It is a classic staple of the horror genre to have it end at a party where the killer is let loose on his unsuspecting victims, and Climax decided to turn that big finale into an entire movie and to make every single character into the monster-figure. It is chaotic and grim and gory, but while other horror movies lose their scary after a watch or two, this one consistently leaves me horrified at the end.