Climax · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman crawls through snow, filmed from straight overhead, dragging a red smear behind her. The camera never comes down to meet her. It hangs there while the shape she makes turns almost legible: a figure, a step, a pose held too long. That is the first image of Climax, and chronologically it is nearly the last. Noé shows you the end, rolls the closing credits, then walks you back into a warm room full of dancers who are about to become that shape in the snow.

So the film has no secret to withhold. What it has is a slope, and ninety-five minutes of watching bodies go down it.

The Deleuzian concept that opens this film isn't the famous one. It's a smaller, meaner category Deleuze built out of Stroheim and Buñuel: the impulse-image. Most cinema runs on a circuit — someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the action resolves things. Naturalism breaks that circuit in a specific way. Action doesn't stall into contemplation; it degrades into appetite. What looks like a decision is a symptom. Hold that up to Climax and the film's supposed weaknesses stop being weaknesses.

Deleuze's naturalism works in two layers. There is the derived milieu, the concrete dated place: a shuttered boarding school in a French winter, 1996, boxy televisions, VHS tapes on the shelf, a large tricolore hung on the wall. And there is the originary world showing through it, a world with no history and no society, only drives and one direction of travel. Watch where the film crosses over. In the first half the corridors are architecture; by the second they are terrain. Same building, different physics. Deleuze says the originary world announces itself through a part-object, a fetish charged with more force than any character. Climax puts its fetish on a table and lights it: the punch bowl. It does nothing. Everyone in the film orbits it anyway.

Then the line of slope, Deleuze's word for entropy given a story shape — the irreversible fall, degradation as the only available future. This is why the whodunit doesn't work and isn't meant to. Noé lets the accusation run, lets them hunt whoever spiked the sangria, and it discloses nothing. In an action film that investigation is the spine. Here it's fuel: a way for drives to acquire targets. Complaints about thin characterization are describing the machine accurately and then calling it broken.

The bodies are the other half of the argument. Late in his life Deleuze proposed a cinema of the body — films that stop using the body as an instrument for carrying out a plot and instead put postures and attitudes on screen, letting time pass through them. Climax has about the purest instance available, because Noé cast dancers and built the film out of what they already were. The opening number, a sustained overhead-and-tracking take with Benoît Debie's camera sliding among the soloists through voguing, waacking, krump, house, isn't an interlude that pauses the story. It is the story's entire positive statement. For those minutes the troupe is one affective unit, twenty bodies operating as a single thing, which is exactly Deleuze's dividual. The second half is the same vocabulary run backwards: isolated writhing, huddles, attacks. Anti-choreography, performed by people who can actually dance, which is why it's unbearable.

And they dance in front of a flag. Deleuze calls a posture that exposes a social relation a gest: the body caught showing what it belongs to. A multiethnic, queer, club-and-street ensemble performing communion beneath the tricolore, then tearing itself apart in the same room, is a gest hung on a wall. Noé put it there. The national reading is offered, not smuggled.

Once the drug lands, the school stops adding up to a map. Corridor, side room, stairwell: each becomes a fragment with its own mood and its own light, stark red here, sickly green there, joined by nothing you could draw. Deleuze's any-space-whatever doesn't mean "anywhere." It means a space that has lost its coordinates and become pure affect, and the disconnection is the technique. Colour does most of the work. Debie's practicals absorb the scene until the building registers the poisoning before the faces do; the colour-image is the feeling itself, not a wash laid over it. This is where the Suspiria tape sitting on the shelf in the opening frame pays its debt. Argento's gelled primaries turned a dance academy into a chromatic trap where the architecture, not the killer, was the threat. Noé takes the palette and removes the killer entirely.

In the final movement the camera turns over. Ceiling becomes floor and the dancers crawl across it. Deleuze took a concept from the Hollywood musical for exactly this: the movement of world, where the dancer stops supplying the movement and the world takes it over, carrying them. In Donen or Minnelli that transfer is ecstasy. Noé keeps the mechanism and swaps the affect. The world moves; you are merely carried.

The long take deserves placing, because Noé is doing something particular with it. Bazin defended the unbroken shot on moral grounds: it preserved the ambiguity of the real and left the viewer free to choose where to look. Climax keeps that ontology and confiscates the freedom. Withholding the cut is the horror mechanism, since no montage means no relief and no exit, and a trip is precisely a duration you don't control. Digital capture made it payable: low light, roving Steadicam runs of many minutes, two weeks of shooting on a treatment rather than a script.

The rest of the shelf pays out too. Possession supplies the convulsive full-body breakdown, performers driven to actual physical collapse, which Sofia Boutella's solo unraveling reproduces with a dancer's control. Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel supplies the bottle — a group that inexplicably cannot leave, a veneer rotting through confinement alone — and Buñuel is one of the two directors Deleuze built the impulse-image from, so that debt runs deeper than the premise. Fassbinder's Querelle supplies the artificial single set drenched in unmotivated colour, the theatrical box the tricolore restages. Noé also borrows from himself: Irréversible's inverted chronology and spiraling handheld, Enter the Void's untethered, sometimes upside-down camera and neon practicals. Climax strips the effects layer off that camera and leaves it walking a hallway.

The aphoristic cards Noé splashes across the fall — birth as a unique opportunity, death as an extraordinary experience — behave like chapter headings for a treatise that never assembles. Deleuze would call that a discourse-image: an image posing a problem it has no means of resolving. The film admits it has a metaphysics and can't argue for it.

What did it do? It fused the dance film's celebration of the body with horror's desecration of it, using one physical vocabulary for both, and built a horror film whose antagonist is chemistry and time rather than a monster. It swapped plot for process. And it proved out a production model — treatment instead of screenplay, real dancers instead of actors, one location, two weeks, improvisation — that has become a reference point, though the film is young enough that modesty about its influence is the honest position.

Here's what to watch on a second pass. Go back to the opening number and look for the moment the unity is already a hierarchy: who is centered, who is waiting, who is watching whom. Deleuze's naturalism holds that the slope precedes the fall, that the originary world was under the parquet the whole time. Climax never tells you whether the sangria caused the cruelty or only took the lid off it. Its refusal to name the poisoner isn't evasion. It's the argument.