Climax

Ahead of Climax’s Quinzaine premiere, Gaspar Noé unveiled the movie’s hilariously boneheaded, almost exclusively text-based one-sheet: a rundown of his filmography, with each entry accompanied by a variation of presumed (not without reason) audience vitriol, capped off with an invitation (complete with a rendering of Noé mischievously grinning): “Now try Climax.” If the Argentine-born French director’s fifth feature was, in fact, intended to provoke outrage—in addition to the poster, his comments to the press seem to indicate as much—then he failed spectacularly, having created his most broadly acclaimed work to date and winning the Directors’ Fortnight’s Art Cinema Award in the process.

Which is not to say that , which transpires across a one-night timeline that covers a dance rehearsal and after-party, (2017)—another hellish, single-location descent more resonant on the level of kinesthetics than metaphorical thematics—the director’s technical bona fides, impishly tasteless humour, and predilection for shock effects are channelled into the most liberating, intensely physical filmmaking of his career. Made from a page-long outline and shot in just over a fortnight, 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. Call it .