Incredibly dull

Rating: 2/10 (9 June 2019)

I expected an erotically charged fever dream full of twisting paranoia, complex choreography and intermingled expressions of lighting, sound, and visual excellence. You know, something that would live up to the simple yet potentially good premise, and serve as an appropriate vehicle for a movie using dance to explore themes of decadence, loss of control, and fear, all of which can be skewed as inherently sexual.
What I got was a poorly paced, repetitive, and above all painfully tedious soup of mediocre and messy choreography, bad acting that was neither compelling or 'authentically' real, some very lazy stereotyping (now with extra by-the-numbers racism, misogyny, and homophobia!) in place of any actual characters or psychological avatars, and some relentlessly boring shots of the same group of people doing the same thing over and over and over again.
There are some relatively committed performances, and some very tired 'enfant terrible' tricks that one would assume Noe would have grown out of by now (flipping the camera upside down, putting the end credits first, and flicking up trite little title cards about the enormity of birth and death are just some of them), but nothing really makes up for the sense of wasted opportunity and, frankly, wasted time.
The best thing in this film is the lighting, and even that - by minute thirteen of a red- or green-drenched shot of the same hallway - wears its welcome very very thin. For those who can get an interesting experience out of this movie, I salute you. Well done.