Gasper Noé doesn’t have much use for subtlety. The European arthouse provocateur (Enter The Void, Irreversible) is a stylist of the unabashedly gonzo, shooting for the sun while accepting that he may simply reach the moon. Each of his films has been ambitiously decadent in one form or another, and with his latest, Noé seems to have found a new outlet for his maximalist sensibilities: the world of dance.
Climax, the director’s first film since 2015's exhausting Love, follows that movie’s tactic of having a cast of mostly nonprofessional actors (here joined by Atomic Blonde’s Sofia Boutella), this time as dancers coming together to rehearse their routine for an upcoming competition. Following the practice, the party starts, and everything unfolds like a breezy Altman-esque talkfest—that is, right until someone spikes the punch. From there, the party devolves into a hallucinatory nightmare of fear, frenzy, and drug-fueled hedonism, the likes of which have rarely been captured on celluloid. Coming out of the film’s premiere at Cannes, Noé—a divisive figure at best—is enjoying some of the best reviews of his career, including from our own A.A. Dowd, who awarded it an A- and says that Climax is “more brilliantly deranged, in its microscopic vision of society in collapse, than anything the director has ever inflicted on us.” And watching Noé’s camera literally turn the world upside down in the trailer, it’s not hard to believe madness soon follows.
Climax will be unleashed into the world sometime later this year, though no date has been set.