Climax (2018)

Gaspar Noé's Climax opens with a dancer stumbling through snow, bleeding, and eventually circles back to explain that image. In between sits a troupe of twenty-four performers, cast largely from the voguing ballrooms and krumping battles of Paris, whose bodies do the work that dialogue never will. The production was assembled in four weeks and shot in fifteen days, with no script, no rehearsals, and a cast that had almost no acting experience. The resulting ensemble is genuinely multiracial and genuinely queer, though neither quality arrives as an argument. It arrives because that is who dances in ballrooms.

Queer life here is unremarkable, which is its own quiet achievement: Ivana and Selva fall into bed, Psyché waits, Daddy comforts Riley, and nobody pauses to explain or defend any of it. The film's treatment of women is another matter. Lou, pregnant and sober, is kicked in the stomach, then handed a knife and encouraged to use it on herself. Selva is stripped of agency by the camera at every turn. This is cruelty as aesthetic, not a feminist statement, and any reading that finds empowerment here is doing work the film refuses to do. The one identity friction in the story, Omar ostracized for declining alcohol on religious grounds, functions as plot mechanics.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. No environmental lament, no critique of capital, no celebration of bodies as they are (these bodies are burned, contorted, and left in snow), no meditation on neurodivergence, no rewriting of the historical record. Noé has said the film is about a collective screw-up and carries no moral agenda, and the film honors that claim. It preaches nothing. It watches a group build something beautiful, poison it, and tear itself apart, which is its own kind of thesis, delivered without a single word of instruction.