Like a nightmarish, inverted Busby Berkeley musical where we get the jubilant spectacle first and then hell and chaos unravel until all we are left with is sex, death, fear, and pain. Is the opening dance just a sublimated rehearsal for the finale? Is the plummet into madness the real performance at work? Noé would probably argue as much. If his entire oeuvre is a paean to entropy then Climax might as well be his magnum opus. Its central thesis (and perhaps Noe’s overarching directorial thesis) seems to be that people are vile, and they deserve to suffer. There may be some Lord of the Flies-esque meta-commentary at play here about how quickly a methodically codified society can descend into chaos, but I think Noé sees it the other way around. In his Hobbsian worldview, society is a behemoth, carnal and sadistic, that has been flimsily decorated to appear civil. Once the superego veneer is unsheathed, true chaotic desire reigns. The dance is the artifice, the chaos the authentic.
But what a lumbering, puerile way to pull back the curtain. Noé is up to his typical antics here – pseudo-philosophical title cards, disjointed credits, nauseating, roller coaster camera pirouettes – and it all feels as tedious as its ever been. Like a lot of his work, this is essentially a 90-minute gimmick. Characters, like the little boy, and character development, like the pregnancy reveal, are merely used as shock props to enhance its comic gruesomeness. You’d almost expect a puppy to stumble upon the proceedings and lap up the sangria just so it too can join in on the torture. Bleh. Granted, the opening dance number is a blast and is astoundingly orchestrated. And there are some truly bravura tracking shots in which we initially begin to take inventory of the degradation, but the incessant retracing of lines feels strained, not revelatory. By the end, it all feels like a tacky haunted house carnival tour. What will we find around this corner? Who cares. The warehouse explicitly assumes the guise of hell by the end– blood red lights gleaming, nondescript shrieks and groans, contorted bodies writhing like souls in the river Styx – but it feels cheap because it is so obviously designed to provoke your paranoid discomfiture. Hailed by some as Noé at his most dynamic, this is him at his most incorrigible.
