Climax: Cinema Psychotherapy

8 min readMar 18, 2019

One way to categorise Gaspar Noé’s 2018 trip-fest Climax is a musical horror, another is psychotherapy, exploring the human condition with filters turned off. It’s at times confusing, unnerving, even terrifying. But then again, I’m sure so is taking an excess of hallucinogenic narcotics.

The premise is fairly simple: a group of talented dancers rehearse an elaborate routine in an abandoned school, followed by a party of electronic music and sangria. They discover, too late, that the drink has been spiked with a whole lot of LSD. The night rapidly descends into a manic nightmare of paranoia, sex and violence. This scintillating trailer previews the horror:

The cinematography encapsulates the madness. Brilliantly shot by Benoît Debie, the film is at times dizzying, even nauseating. There are long scenes shot entirely upside-down, or spinning from a bird’s-eye-view. Colours range from grimy green to intense red; you find yourself actively wanting these disorientating scenes to end. What’s more the thumping techno soundtrack begins from the opening dance sequence, and it never stops.

Critics (eg Mark Kermode) have simplified this style to just being a trope of the infamous director; ‘it’s just Noé shocking for the sake of being provocative!’. But shooting a film specifically about a collection of people descending into a psychedelic orgy of insanity through reasonable processes of film-making would be entirely disingenuous.

Noé sets up the characters and plots through a series of tableaux: recorded interviews, a dance sequence, a series of dialogues. It is unemotional and unsentimental: a juxtaposition of the insanity to come. This, along with inter-cut titles bearing messages such as “Death is an extraordinary experience” creates an intrinsic sense of dread. When a character introduces her son to the group in one of the opening scenes you may find yourself, like me, muttering to yourself, “Oh god, there’s a child?!”

The question is, how do you begin to cinematically visualise an intense, group psychedelic trip? One way would be ‘literally’: to perceptibly take the audience within the mind of characters and show their hallucinations. But Noé makes the inspired choice to keep the audience within the sphere of external observer. It is far more terrifying to see a character contort their body and shriek manically at a vision we cannot see. The audience can only attempt to fill in the gaps with what sort of disturbing fantasy their psyches are projecting around them.

What the premise of the movie boils down to is a social experiment, with LSD as the variable. As observers the audience are co-opted into this experiment: a kind of cinema psychotherapy.

Somewhat startlingly, there is science behind the idea of using psychedelic drugs in therapy, dating back to the mid-20th Century.

Invented in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, LSD began being experimented with by Scientists and Psychiatrists in the 1950s. Psycholytic therapy is one form of the technique, which involves dosing low to medium amounts of psychedelic drugs over a repetitive period at intervals of 1–2 weeks. The therapist is present during peak psychedelic trips, with the ultimate goal being to provide a safe, mutually compassionate context through which the profound and intense reliving of memories can be filtered through the principles of genuine psychotherapy.

That certainly doesn’t sound like Climax.

Psychedelic therapy in its purest form consists of very high level doses of hallucinogenic drugs, listening to non-lyrical music and exploring the subconscious experience. As Harvard Professors Lester Grinspoon M.D. and James B. Bakalar wrote in the early 80s, the aim of this therapy was…

“to incorporate the most significant events in the patient’s emotional life and permit a systematic exploration of personality.”

Extremely high doses of hallucinogens? Excessive non-lyrical music? Exploring the subconscious experience? Gaspar Noé bingo.

Climax shows psychedelic therapy applied to its non-clinical extreme, but the theory remains. Stanislav Grof was perhaps the first psychiatrist to study LSD as a tool for healing via non-ordinary states of consciousness. In the 1950s he quickly found that visions people had on the drug seemed to uncover the patient’s inner problems and conflicts.

If this is starting to sound a little Freudian, it is. Psychedelic therapy has often been compared to a practical path of psychoanalysis to uncover the subconscious state. As Grinspoon and Bakalar put it:

“An advantage of psychedelic drugs in exploring the unconscious is that a fragment of the adult ego usually keeps watch through all the fantasy adventures.”

Patients remain intellectually alert and remember the experiences vividly. They become acutely aware of ego defences and can catch themselves in the act of creating them. The drug puts the superego into Airplane mode, stimulating honesty and authenticity in patients, who are now unbound by societal expectations. Dr Mortimer Hartman, who also used LSD as a method of treating patients (including the actor Cary Grant in the 50s) described the drug as:

“a psychic energizer which empties the subconscious and intensifies emotion and memory a hundred times.”

We see this in Climax, as characters who drank the most sangria begin speaking in an alarmingly candid way with increasingly intense emotion, as shown through a lengthy series of inter-cut dialogues. Two male characters begin talking in disguised tones about who they find attractive in the group, but by the end of the sequence they are exuberant in describing how they would like to flash their “pythons” at the women, and “stick it in her arse… dry”. However, more importantly, it becomes evident that almost every character has personal issues, and secrets they’re trying to hide: pregnancies, affairs, sexual curiosity, incest.

These are all talented dancers: people who use their bodies to silently express themselves. The film opens like a sort of techno ballet, featuring a long, choreographed shot in which each character has a dance “solo” which acts as an indicator of their personality. Later, as the LSD takes hold, these insecurities and private emotions are bluntly exposed.

Characters in *Climax all have secrets to hide. Some more f***** up than others.*

Psychedelic therapy was found to speed up psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, especially for people with excessively strict emotional barriers (superego) and a lack of self-esteem. It was also used to overcome the resistance of severe chronic neurotics with defences so rigid that they would otherwise be inaccessible to treatment. If the purpose of using LSD in therapy was as a tool to bring into consciousness personal thoughts and troubles, Climax shows this on a group, unregulated scale. The movie uses LSD as a tool to demonstrate the extreme brutality innate in every human. And the results are chaos.

“It’s about losing control… it’s a catastrophe movie” — Gaspar Noé

Of course, anyone who knows about the background to the Charles Manson murders will be aware of the dangers of pumping copious supplies of acid into your veins. Climax compresses that experience of prolonged exposure to LSD into one evening. It is a terrifying depiction of humanity without the filter of the superego, a kind of twisted horror version of The Invention of Lying. Characters begin acting without a sense of culpability or empathy: physical abuse, rape, gleefully pressuring individuals to self-harm.

However, through this madness, Noé does maintain a sense of structure and consistency. Characters who drank the most sangria clearly have the most extreme reaction. Sofia Boutella puts in a brilliantly disturbing performance as Selva. She is one of the characters most affected by the drug, but rather than losing focus she gives an alarmingly real performance. The terror in her eyes is utterly authentic, and leaves the audience in no doubt that while figuratively out of her mind, she remains intellectually alert and aware of her experience. She does not black out or enter into a stupor, she is living in a cerebral nightmare; forced to experience the very extremes of mental condition, as well as her personal demons.

What about the other patient in this psychotherapy session: the audience?

How you respond to this film is, of course, entirely down to personal reflection. How do you react to this depiction of the human condition with the stabilizers removed? The characters in Climax are all relatively normal people, so perhaps Noé is a nihilist, arguing that human nature is innately selfish - just a few levels of social conditioning removed from anarchy. It is certainly not one for the ‘there’s goodness in all of us’ argument.

Or perhaps it is a demonstration of the importance of restraints we put on ourselves, how balance to our mental equilibrium is vital to social order. Two main impulses surface from the ‘therapy session’: sex and violence. With filters removed, Noé is suggesting that humanity becomes totally primal. Through the course of the experience, almost every character resorts to either harming others, harming themselves, having sex, or attempting to.

Like the callous individual who spiked the sangria, Noé is not a benevolent therapist, but rather a slightly manic experimentalist. He throws a cocktail of insanity at the wall to see what sticks.

Climax is about the trip (pun intended) rather than the destination. We are not granted a particularly satisfying pay-off for the chaos, nor do we gain an insight into the reaction and lasting impact on the characters. There is no attempt to reconcile the events. But those endings would be in danger of imploring sympathy, which Noé does not want to invoke; it is not a tragedy and certainly not cathartic. Noé described Climax most accurately himself: a “catastrophe movie” (although personally I prefer “techno-horror-ballet”).

It is certainly not an easy film to watch, but even if you don’t enjoy it, I can almost guarantee it will leave a major impression on you. And hey, if you do make it through the whole thing well done you. Relax, and enjoy the sensation of having control over your own brain.