Director: Gaspar Noe
Starring: Sofia Boutella, Romain Guillermic, Souheila Yacoub
Year: 2018
Climax might be the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen Surf Nazis Must Die, so that’s saying something. The ultimate worst movie of all time has to be Room, but that’s on a completely different level, as are the Sharknado films, although even those levels are miles apart. But Climax is its own style of terrible, and that’s impressive for a feature from Gaspar Noe, who seems to wallow in the wacky. I didn’t dislike Love, I thought it was fascinating, the real sex element aside, and I didn’t think I was going to dislike Climax either, because I don’t mind irreverent. But this film isn’t irreverent, it’s nihilist, it cares for nothing, least of all how audiences will feel after watching chaos for 90 minutes, with no break for normalcy and no reason not to fast forward to the end.
A group of French dancers come together to rehearse an intense piece made up of their own styles, gathering at an old school building for space and for privacy, and working hard to get the number just right. They are all talented in their own ways, each has a unique style to contribute, and the dance they practice is very raw, full of emotion and power. After their last practice, they take a break for a party; after all, they’ve earned it. But what they don’t know is that someone has spiked their signature sangria with LSD, and the drug is about to affect them all in a variety of horrible ways. What follows is a collapse of reason and of control, issuing a new norm of random sex and violence, until all hell has literally broken loose.
Honestly, you could fast forward to the end, there’s no reason to watch the middle, but there’s also no reason to watch how it all turns out; there’s nothing to see here, folks. This movie is nothing, absolutely nothing, it might as well not exist, and I think that borders on criminal, that a director should create something so selfishly pointless that it makes no impact at all except to waste space. And it would waste more than that if it were able to bring anything out of those watching it, but it can’t, it doesn’t have any sort of power, and that’s just another reason to wish that it had never been made. Love pushed boundaries; Climax is a flash in the pan that you missed when you blinked, and there’s nothing that comes from it anyway, so you don’t regret the loss. It really is one of the worst things I’ve ever watched, if only because it has so little say. You could sit and think about it for a lifetime and you wouldn’t come up with a deeper meaning other than an artist’s overblown ego let loose, and if that’s the point than I’m writing Noe off as someone who doesn’t deserve my time.
My rating: ☆