Cli­max

A glit­ter­ing Tri­col­ore hangs on the back wall of a grungy com­mu­ni­ty hall where a pro­fes­sion­al dance ensem­ble are gath­ered for what is to be their final rehearsal. As a thump­ing house track blares out from a PA sys­tem, the dancers launch into an exhil­a­rat­ing five-minute rou­tine, the cam­era cap­tur­ing their every bump, grind and twist in a sin­gle, swirling take.

They break only for the par­ty atmos­phere to imme­di­ate­ly be cranked up sev­er­al notch­es. The cam­era keeps rolling, rov­ing freely around the open-plan space to cap­ture snip­pets of con­ver­sa­tion by turns idle and inti­mate. The dancers laugh and chat and drink and dance some more. Then some­one spikes the punch and the cel­e­bra­to­ry set­ting is sud­den­ly trans­formed into a hedo­nis­tic hellscape.

Wel­come to the lat­est Very Bad Trip from lov­able rogue Gas­par Noé, direc­tor of such eye-water­ing works as Irréversible, Enter the Void and Love. Depict­ing humanity’s worst excess­es is Noé’s forte, of course, and the con­tro­ver­sy court­ing Argen­tine clear­ly rel­ish­es putting his cast of twerk­ing twen­tysome­things through the wringer.

Among the per­form­ers in this Dan­tean dis­co are a bick­er­ing les­bian cou­ple, a sin­gle moth­er and her young son, an over­pro­tec­tive broth­er with inces­tu­ous incli­na­tions and a pair of adi­das-clad bros who casu­al­ly brag about hav­ing ​“dry” anal sex with the women in their com­pa­ny. And then there’s star-on-the-rise Sofia Boutel­la, who gives a per­for­mance that can only be described as ful­ly committed.

It’s a pity Noé spends so much time chore­o­graph­ing the immer­sive long takes which make up the mer­ci­ful­ly lean run­time (when the cuts aren’t neat­ly con­cealed they’re marked by frame-fill­ing, pseu­do philo­soph­i­cal title cards such as ​“Birth is a Unique Oppor­tu­ni­ty”) instead of flesh­ing out his char­ac­ters. Watch­ing the cast go com­plete­ly nuts is a lot of fun, but ulti­mate­ly it’s hard to actu­al­ly care about the gris­ly fate that befalls them.