Climax

A dance troupe, a bowl of spiked sangria, and Gaspar Noé's camera refusing to cut for twenty minutes at a time.

The opening is a genuine ten-minute dance sequence in one take, performed by real dancers, and it is exhilarating. What follows is the same building over one night as everybody realises what is in the drink.

Noé shot it in fifteen days with a five-page outline and largely improvised dialogue, and the camera work does the drug: it inverts, it hangs from the ceiling, it follows people down corridors for minutes without relief.

The credits appear at three different points, which is a joke that also functions as a structural warning.

It is unbearable in the last third by design and there is a sequence involving a child that a lot of people cannot get past.