There’s a debate among horror nerds that goes like this: “Blumhouse or A24?” If this is Greek to you, Blumhouse and A24 are entertainment production companies that both make notable horror films. I’ve always leaned a bit toward A24, to the point of making a list of their horror films and watching them when I can find them on streaming services. Since I generally don’t read about movies before watching them, I wasn’t sure what Climax was going to be. Distributed by A24, I figured it would be intelligent horror and it may have been. Honestly, it was a little difficult to tell. Nihilistic and non-scripted, it’s a movie with a very slight premise: a French dance troupe holds an after-practice party in which somebody spikes the sangria with LSD. The entire first half of the movie, practically, is dancers doing their stuff to an incessant techno-beat. I honestly don’t know why I kept with it.
Since it’s unscripted, most of the young people talk about sex, and occasionally other topics. They begin to get paranoid when the acid kicks in, and throw one of the dancers out in dangerous winter conditions where he freezes to death. They think he spiked the drink. The troupe manager, also a suspect, has a young son that she locks into an electrical closet for protection, with predictable results. Since she also drank the sangria, the troupe supposes she must be innocent. A third non-drinker, who is pregnant, also gets accused. Meanwhile some dancers keep on dancing while others start to pair off, all of them but the pregnant one, tripping hard. In the end the police arrive and find dead or stoned dancers and really that’s about it.
How is this horror? Psychologically, mostly. There is a little body horror, but mostly it’s just viewers wondering what is going to happen. Which, it turns out, is not much. There are some religious references in the movie, which maybe offer a little depth, but really this is largely a filmed rave-like dance with a minimal storyline tossed in for good measure. Also, it’s in French, meaning subtitles are important for following whatever plot there is. Wikipedia leads me to believe Gaspar Noé, the “writer”-director is fond of making polarizing and controversial movies. There’s nothing surprising about young people being interested in music and sex, nor, for that matter alcohol and drugs. All of this is entirely conventional. It isn’t enough for me to lose faith in A24, but it does make me wonder what they were thinking.
