Climax

Only too late did I realise I was stuck in this location with these flawed characters and there would be no escape as things slowly started to turn into something very uncomfortable that glued me to my screen, anxious and unnerved as hell. That feeling of being in a nightmare you can't wake up from. I can easily imagine someone hating this, but I was darkly fascinated throughout. My buns must've had a good workout from all the clenching, goddamn.

There will always be those for whom Noé is merely a provocateur and purveyor of shallow ideas. To me, he seems to be asking himself how the cinematic art could fulfil some kind of moral responsibility. Here, this involves an attempt to push further into the notion of cinema-going as a psycho-physical experience, in order to awaken a sense of how a profound underlying collective discontent can be expressed in the desire for transformational psycho-physical experiences such as heavy drug-taking.

Dude sure loves seeing pregnant women get kicked in the stomach, I'll give him that.

Climax achieves in 95 minutes what took Enter the Void over 2,5 hours: make a movie that feels like it's over 2,5 hours long. Some of the choices made by Noé are very strange. For example, the music could've been much louder, shittier and more repetitive. The camera didn't do nearly enough flips. The amount of tracking shots is also very disappointing. Moreover, why is only half of this movie's runtime filled with people screaming in agony? Really seems like Noé is getting soft on us.

Gone is the hovering detachment of his last two films, Noé is direct and more threatening than ever -- Not letting the viewer leave his demonic playground for a second. Time feels eternal in "Climax" and Noé takes full advantage of this. Curiously following the demonic choreography of his subjects; watching them mindlessly descend into the depths of their primal fears and desires. Unrivalled work of horror.