Review of Climax (2018) by Amadouiraklidis — 27 Sep 2022

Very, very good. The reason this doesn't receive a higher score is because it drifted a bit far into depravity, showcasing a lot of truly unlikeable people with repugnant views of the world. It portrays the "dancer scene" as being hedonistic, nihilistic, and, ultimately, a group of abject losers.

That aside, what made the movie so good was the improvisation, the stakes, how it all fit together, and the filmography. The long shots were incredible, the improvisation made it very fluid. This did not come across as a try hard, high school teenage drama movie. The conversations weren't written by a bored intern. The improvisation was striking. This felt like being a fly on the wall in the midst of a party consisting purely of low life gypsies.

The stakes continuously elevate and meander, so the things that come up can be intensely mind-blowing and unexpected. Once you start experiencing the feelings the movie is conveying, those feelings take hold of you and grow. The story takes you along a series of paths, yet those paths don't feel disjointed. They all connect and fit correctly by the end, like multiple hardly used paths in a forest. They all seem adventurous and arbitrary, damning and daunting, yet they all end up in the same place, and in doing so, reveal the calculated chaos of the paths.

An enthralling movie, through and through.