Climax: Worse Trips

Bad trips are a great source of horror. There’s a sense that everything is out of your control, that there’s no safe harbor, no certainty you can turn to, and because it’s all a product of your own distorted perceptions, there’s no way to run from it. Wherever you go, there you are, and even closing your eyes just brings more awful visions. It’s as close as you can get to the nightmare from which you cannot wake up.

Bad trips played a big part in last week’s Mandy, but mostly as a way to get some really striking visuals up on the screen. It wasn’t even so much about an actual bad trip as it was the way bad trips have been typically portrayed onscreen and using that visual vocabulary to evoke a mood.

Climax is sort of at the other end of the spectrum. It’s less about the imagery of the bad trip, and more about the experience and consequences of a bad trip. It’s a queasy, emotionally exhausting portrait of psychological disintegration.

We open on a figure running and stumbling through snow, sobbing, shot from high overhead. They collapse, the ground streaked red around them. Roll final credits. It’s disorienting, to say the least. Before we can really get our bearings, we cut to a close-up on an old television, broadcasting audition videotapes, and here the story starts to come into focus. A choreographer named Selva is auditioning dancers for a touring production. We’re introduced to 20 dancers, mostly young, varying in how worldly they are. Some are achingly naïve, naked in their desire to succeed, others are more jaded, some come from tough backgrounds.

Cut to rehearsal, the company performing a routine in an empty school that they’re using as a practice space and dormitory. Their dancing is vibrant, raw, libidinous. They’re almost ready to go out on tour and this is their last practice. The routine finished, they gather around a bowl of sangria prepared by Emmanuelle - the company’s manager, a former dancer whose unplanned pregnancy cut her career short - dancing less formally to music provided by their DJ, breaking off into groups to gossip and drink and unwind.

Everyone brings their own thing into the troupe, as evident from their audition tapes and the conversations we observe. Some of them are more emotionally healthy than others, some are downright pigs, and you can see the attachments and divisions and jealousies and resentments that have already formed among them. Who’s sleeping with whom, who’s already slept with whom, who’s slept with everyone, who wants to sleep with whom, tensions and rivalries and yearning. And then, one by one, they start to feel sick and dizzy. They start getting overheated.

Someone’s spiked the sangria with LSD.

So we have all of these people with their hopes and fears and resentments and tangled intimacies, stuck in an empty schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter, they’re starting to hallucinate, and they’re totally unprepared for it. Once the drugs kick in, it starts getting very ugly, very quickly. Blame flies and mob ugliness erupts as they realize they’ve been dosed, and then abandoned as they become consumed by their own internal hells. Desires are laid bare - whether to fuck or fight or kill, and the mask of civilization that keeps their worst impulses in check is ripped off. Every grudge, every secret jealousy, every need, it’s all out in the open as the dancers lose their ability to maintain any sort of emotional equilibrium. The way people love each other, hate each other, hate themselves, it’s all naked and exposed to the world, with no mediation, and all sense of good judgment falters. These aren’t the bad trips of Mandy or exploitation film in general - there’s no swirling light or chromatic aberration or imagined monsters and hellish landscapes. Just screaming and tears and piss and vomit and blood, casual emotional cruelty.

The film’s style mirrors the internal state of its characters. We don’t know what they’re seeing or feeling specifically, but everything about the film communicates the disorientation and profound alienation of the bad trip. The opening dance number is shot as a single take, and then the afterparty conversations are quick, short takes cutting fast from one set of people to another, almost like the camera is blinking. Then. once things start to fall apart, the second half of the film is a single unbroken take, the camera fixing onto one person and following them around from place to place, room to room, and as things go from bad to worse, that long, unbroken take becomes a journey through something like a haunted house, where something terrible is likely going on behind any given door.

The camera abandons one person to follow another, and people wander through scenes of others’ grief or rage or lacerating self-abuse, with the natural lighting of the opening giving way to deep shadows and sickly reds and greens, shots tilting at unnatural angles or flipping over upside down entirely to heighten the feeling of disorientation, a feeling which extends to the way the film is structured. The events themselves are chronologically ordered, from the end of rehearsal to the aftermath the next day, but the film begins with its end credits, the opening credits appear halfway through, and the title appears at the end. It all converges to heighten the feeling that things are out of control, out of order, that something has gone seriously amiss, ending in the room where it all started, now lit entirely in reds, shot upside down, bodies writhing and contorting in violence and lust and both intermingled, like something out of Bosch, abstracted and visceral at the same time.

In its raw, jagged displays of emotion, lack of stable center, tremendous harm happening in passing or on the periphery, it’s all like the bright, brittle desperation of that party that’s gone on just a little too long, where the fun’s all starting to look desperate and feverish, but turned up to a deafening pitch. You want to go home, you want to be someplace warm and safe and familiar, but home is a long way away, and by the end, everyone has abandoned themselves and all sense for whatever consumes them from the inside out.

IMDB entry
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