This year Gaspar Noé is back with Climax (2018), another movie taken from his dreams and nightmares. The Argentina-born French filmmaker is presenting once again a movie where visual and conceptual experimentation is the motor of the film. Written, shot and edited in only four months, the movie centers on a group of French dancers who gather in a remote, empty school building to rehearse on a wintry night. The all-night celebration morphs into a hallucinatory nightmare when they learn their sangria is laced with LSD.
Taking place in 1996, 20 urban dancers join together for a three-day rehearsal in a closed-down boarding school located at the heart of a forest to share one last dance. They then make one last party around a large sangria bowl. Quickly, the atmosphere becomes charged and a strange madness will seize them the whole night. If it seems obvious to them that they have been drugged, they neither know by who or why. And it’s soon impossible for them to resist their neuroses and psychoses, numbed by the hypnotic and the increasing electric rhythm of the music. While some feel in paradise, most of them plunge into hell.
The movie has been considered a horror musical, which in the hands of Noé surely is not going to be the average entertainment product. Climax (2018) has been rated R for disturbing content involving a combination of drug use, violent behavior, and strong sexuality, and for language and some graphic nudity, so there you go. Sofia Boutella, a long experience street dancer recycled as one of the most interesting action actresses nowadays with titles like Monsters: Dark Continent (2014), Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014), Star Trek: Beyond (2016), Atomic Blonde (2017), The Mummy (2017) and the recent Hotel Artemis (2018), heads the cast of dancers starring in Climax (2018).
Writer and director Gaspar Noé gained international recognition thanks to his hipper violent and sexualized film Irréversible (2002). Although his previous work, Love (2015), was highly disappointing, his movie Enter the Void (2009) was a cinematographical experience close to a drug trip in the shape of a crime drama. Climax (2018) has already had an extense run in festivals where it has achieved very good reviews and impressions. After being screened at Cannes Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival, Odessa International Film Festival, Jerusalem Film Festival, New Horizons Film Festival, New Zealand International Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Fantastic Fest, Vancouver International Film Festival and Busan International Film Festival, to name the most renowned ones, tomorrow it will be part of the line-up of the Sitges Film Festival opening day.
Here you can watch the official trailer for Climax (2018):
