MAMI Review: Climax (7 Stars)

Rating: 7/10 (1 November 2018)

There is so much energy in Gaspar Noe's Climax that I wanted to jump out of my seat and start dancing to the beats of the continuously humming techno soundtrack. Sadly, my fellow audience wouldn't have let me, but deep inside I believe that if I actually did, they would have only joined me. Such is the power of Noe's beautiful, philosophical, and insane techno-dance thriller that hypnotizes from the first frame itself through its immensely talented actors to the anti-climactic credits placement and shots of textual philosophical one-liners to eventually the conveyance of the moral of the short story. The story about a group of French dancers practicing in an old abandoned school premises for an upcoming tournament so that they can compete with the Yankees and show who rules the dancing world takes an ugly turn when the idiosyncratic characters - not one as same as the other - find out that their cocktail was laced with LSD by someone. Who? Why? These questions is in everyone's mind, but the music never stops and no one is in their right mind to sit and think and investigate. And by the time director Noe ends the shots - most of which are single takes - you realize that what you are seeing in front of you is the definition of intoxication and its consequences in its purest form. Climax is true madness and it will blow you away with its truthfulness. TN.
(Watched and reviewed at its India premiere at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.)