Climax (2018)

I'm not sure if successfully completing a Gasper Noe film is something to celebrate but here I am. After two failed attempts at "Enter the Void" I thought his work would evade me, then one day during a trippy jazz jam session I felt inspired to watch Noe's most accessible film - Climax. Thankfully, I was accompanied by a friend so I had no choice but to finish it. This experience was the farthest thing from pleasant but that's sort of the whole point. It's a dangerous mind experiment to wonder what would happen if a group of people, in this case dancers, were secretly drugged with acid. Noe seems to assume the worst. I'm starting to think he hasn't had the best experiences with psychedelics. I really liked a lot of the characters going into the trippy section of the film but then everyone's integrity is just completely destroyed. Acid is a wild thing but I don't think it would drag everyone to hell the way Noe depicts here. Overall, this is an intoxicating film created with a bare production successfully conveying it's poignant message that acid could possibly be the scariest thing ever.

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