Reseñas de la crítica

The danger is not so much that a spectacle of shock would rile the viewer into an emotional fervor. The opposite seems more likely: inured to shock, the viewer would rather feel nothing at all in the face of abject cruelty.

"Climax" has much in common with "Irreversible" and "Enter the Void," although "Climax" is also a weirdo acid-trip polemic (there's that flag of France on the wall, a flag everyone mentions with uneasiness and disgust).

_The sangria’s been spiked and everybody’s going nuts._ Leave it to Gaspar Noé to take that silly, simple little premise and build an intense, invigorating, terrifying, politically resonant vision of Hell around it.

The run-of-the-mill homemade joints that I love, posted online to little institutional fanfare, are better cinema than much of anything in Noé’s oeuvre—Cannes be damned. This is the film that proves it.

While plunging deeper and deeper into pure corporeal horror, this once sleek, vivid movie grows increasingly vague, inconcrete, obedient to an externally imposed logic rather than an internal one—things fall apart not because they do, but because they must. The difference is that between a controlled demolition and an accident, between spectacle and true, total terror.

A technical tour-de-force, an unabashed act of aggression, and a surprisingly resonant exercise in what might be termed visceral moral philosophy. A vigorous dance rehearsal segues into an LSD-fueled orgy of bad behavior and mad disinhibition. Proceed with caution.

It feels possessed by an almost occult energy, navigating far beyond its narrative particulars to locate drug-fuelled arenas, sensorially overwhelming and flush with the agonies and ecstasies of a particularly bad trip.

Self-justified provocation trumps any sense of profundity here, and it is difficult for me to say I liked the film when I had to momentarily leave the screening due to feeling physical ill, but Climax was nonetheless a unique cinematic experience, and stood so stunningly apart from an otherwise prosaic Director’s Fortnight line-up that it was hard to dispute the jury’s decision to give it the sidebar’s main prize.

It feels rare to see a nuanced dissection of the effects of drugs on screen. The real-life rollercoaster results tend to get lost in translation, too often played as a comedic subplot or tragic death sentence. Noé’s dancers perform physical and mental intoxication with a heterogenous, visceral honesty.

Beyond energy, Climax is also a great film about presence — to be “here”, but also to be “now” — which is curious given that it’s a period piece set 22 years ago. It’s a movie on the verge of a new, unknowable millennium (which didn’t quite yet connote apocalyptic prognoses), of complete awareness and complete forgotten-ness—of letting go of what it means to be human, alive, capable of dying.

Noé has probably never been likened to Lazarus before – or any other saint, for that matter – but he’s fully earned himself the comparison with Climax, which constitutes a miraculous comeback after the nadir that was Love. It has all the in-your-face trademarks of the Noé brand, but here they’re packaged in a compact, expertly crafted horror flick that transcends its puerility to achieve something altogether sublime.

Not only Noé's least juvenile, most accomplished movie but also a much more enjoyable trolling from him than usual, drawing its surprises from structural fillips and formal mastery rather than outrage-bait content.