Twenty young dancers rehearse in an empty hall. Beneath strobing lights and pounding music, their bodies contort and writhe into hypnotic, unearthly shapes. Then it’s over and the party proper begins, a humming declaration of youth and beauty and charged eroticism. But this is Gaspar Noé (Irreversible, Enter the Void, Love) we’re talking about, and soon one fateful decision will send them spiralling into a frantic hellscape where they’ll discover the true savagery hiding behind their façades.

Noé is no stranger to cinematic overload and in Climax he turns in his most viscerally affecting work yet. A runaway train of a film told in long Steadicam shots, extraordinary choreography and a pulsing soundtrack from the likes of Daft Punk and Aphex Twin, this is Noé doing what he does best: taking us deep into the forbidden and unspoken reaches of our own humanity.

Winner of the Art Cinema Award at Cannes, the top prize in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar.

"Visually extraordinary, structurally and formally audacious … Noé is giving us a cinema of sensual outrageousness and excess that makes other films look middleaged and tame." – PETER BRADSHAW, THE GUARDIAN