While the expressive movement of dance is quite a transportive and personal release, a night out at the club is still just sweaty gyrating.

While the ego is taking a momentary back seat during the simulation of possession through musical pulsations, you’re not losing all control, no matter how much you might hope to be- because losing all control would be utterly terrifying. Yet for director Gaspar Noé, losing all control, and seeing what depths of human depravity one succumbs to in those moments of pure helplessness, is exactly what he’s most fascinated in putting on the big screen.

It’s club-gone-crazy in Climax, Noé’s latest psychotic head explosion of a film. Following a troupe of dancers on their last night before leaving France for America to embark on a tour, these young dancers – each with their own personal histories between each other – take to cutting loose, and unknowingly getting drugged by an unattended sangria bowl. It’s an eventual acid-laced mental unraveling, built-in slow, sinful sensation, and all soundtracked to the fuzzy deep bass waves vibrating through the walls (Justice and Daft Punk among the cuts). Pulsations of pleasure turn inescapable and horrific, turning everyone (including Sofia Boutella) into their most helpless, animalistic and amoral selves, making for a haunted house experience on a demonic dance floor.

If it wasn’t known before, Climax is not rated, which is something you should absolutely know before going into it. While watching any Gaspar Noé film (he’s also the mind behind Enter the Void) can be a torturous event, it’s also the rare, unflinching look at what can best be seen as an exploration of human behavior. Sex, drugs, and graphic violence (and sometimes all three at the same time) are heightened to their most extreme, pushing one over their rational senses to helplessness and depravity. While Noé’s last film, Love, shocked audiences, it did so with its sentimentality. In Climax, it’s a return to devilish form which had my head-spinning from start to finish – when I wasn’t trying to watch through my hands.

If you haven’t been spooked off just yet (and I certainly hope you haven’t), I’d strongly stress that there is so much to love about this movie, and certainly as much to show how skilled a filmmaker Noé is: a compilation of single-cut interviews open the film, followed by a choreographed dance routine (shot in a single take, one of the film’s highlights), as well as his trademark neon strobe style title credits. Climax is not for the faint of heart. And it’s certainly more than just for music or dance fans, this is for outright risk-takers who want to be utterly disturbed and shocked. It’s bass bumping, twisted and dark. And sometimes that’s exactly what you’re looking for.

CLIMAX (2019)

Starring Sofia Boutella, Romain Guillermic, Souheila Yacoub

Directed by Gaspar Noé

Written by Gaspar Noé

Distributed by A24. 95 minutes. Streaming on Amazon Prime.