Picking a film to watch for a review every week is an absolute nightmare, mostly because there is so much choice out there and I am hugely indecisive. To counteract this, I have been asking friends and family to recommend films for me to review. This mostly led to films that I did not have access to or had already seen. However, on particular friend did manage to recommend not one, but two films for me. The first was ‘i’m thinking of ending things’ (2020) which turned out to not necessarily be a straight up horror. So, I returned to my friend for another recommendation, and he suggested Gaspar Noe’s ‘Climax’ (2018). After seeing it I am seriously questioning the friendship as friend would recommend a film like this. The film follows a group of dancers who have gathered in a school for rehearsals before going on a tour of France and the USA. After winding down their night takes an intense turn after their sangria is spiked with LSD.
This is very much a film of two halves and so I am going to write this review in two halves also. This first half will focus on the first forty-five minutes of the film which I didn’t think were great. After a solid opening shot of a unknown character running through the snow, dripping blood and in clear distress, we go into forty minutes of either watching the characters dancing or just standing around having conversations. The conversations, although well performed, are basically just a quick way of getting us to know a little bit about their personalities and don’t really add anything else to the film except maybe lull the audience into a false sense of security by boring them. These conversations just went on for to long and was also visually pretty dull. And then we have the dance scenes. These are more visually interesting, but the problem I have with them is that they force me to watch people dancing. Now, I have nothing against people who enjoy dancing, but I personally have no care for it at all. I mean, I enjoy dancing myself, but as an art form it does nothing for me. I don’t get it and I find it more boring than anything else. So asking me to watch multiple scenes of people dancing for almost a third of your film is not going to get me on your good side.
And now we get to the second half of the film. And if I dislike the first half, I bloody well hated the second half. But this time I hated it for the exact reasons the film wanted me to hate it. From the forty-five-minute mark until the final moments, this film is an utterly insane nightmare that I constantly wanted to escape from. It is a visceral assault on the senses, and it continues to build and build until you are wishing it to end. On every level possible it is horrific. The constant pounding music only drowned out by guttural screams and shouts that are coming from both off and on screen means that you are never allowed to have a break from the horrific noise. This is matched by the lighting which is a mix of a deep red that makes it difficult to see or a horrible green. Mix these lights with the camera movements that are enough to make you feel nauseous. Speaking of the camera, I would be remiss not to mention that almost the entire second half of this film is done in one long take, or at the very least what looks like one long take. Not only is this an impressive feat of filmmaking but it also adds to this feeling of an inability to escape that makes the film so horrific. All of this is only accentuated by what actually occurs in the narrative during this second half. Some of the stuff that these characters end up doing is genuinely horrific and there were a couple moments that were massively difficult to watch. And then the final ten minutes decides to go for the kill. Turning the camera upside down and becoming an insane moment of noise and visuals, it takes all the madness that had come previous and turns it to eleven. I genuinely can’t explain how unpleasant the whole experience was, so I guess the film was successful.
Unlike my friend, I won’t be recommending this film. And it is not because I think it is bad because for the most part it is not. It is an impressive film on a technical level, and as a horror film it completely succeeds in what it is trying to do. Unfortunately, what it is trying to do is give the audience a hugely unpleasant experience and I cannot recommend it because of how successful it is in doing this. It is generally one of the more horrific films I have seen in recent memory and I would be happy to die having never seen it again. Not a bad film at all, and yet I find myself hating it. Job done, I guess.