Us Metaphor and Ending NOT Explained – Review #31.2

The instant that Jordan Peele’s second feature, Us, hit theaters, a thousand publications published articles and Youtubers posted videos with titles promising variations on “US ENDING EXPLAINED.” I haven’t read any of those articles; I’m not going to watch any of the videos. Because that claim is absurd. Dan Olson of Folding Ideas did a much better video about this than I ever could, which I’ll link to down below, but let’s be clear: Anyone who says that they can “explain” any piece of art to you is lying.

All they can do is consider it. Which is what I’m doing here, and now that I’m saying it out loud… well, it sounds kinda pretentious. Oops.

Hello, by the way, and Welcome to The Week I Review. My name is Sorta Tethered, and this video is a spoilerific companion to the regular ol’ review I posted of Us earlier today. If you haven’t seen this movie, I’d recommend watching that other video, going to see the movie (it’s quite good), and then coming back to this one.

And now: an abridged reading of Jeremiah chapter 11 – New International Version:

‘Obey me and do everything I command you, and you will be my people, and I will be your God. Then I will fulfill the oath I swore to your ancestors, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey’—the land you possess today. But they did not listen or pay attention; instead, they followed the stubbornness of their evil hearts. They have returned to the sins of their ancestors, who refused to listen to my words. They have followed other gods to serve them. *Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.* The people will go and cry out to the gods to whom they burn incense, but they will not help them at all when disaster strikes. Do not pray for these people or offer any plea or petition for them. The Lord Almighty has decreed disaster.’

Oh boy.

I should have known from Us’s opening shot what it was really about, with the first onscreen image being a commercial for the 1986 Hands Across America charity event and all. That event, which happened only once, was supposed to be a powerful symbol in the fight against poverty and homelessness, where people across the country linked hands in an unbroken line from coast to coast for fifteen minutes. Of course, it failed, but it surely would have been a statement had it succeeded.

And that’s why The Tethered are set to recreate it.

(It’s interesting that Santa Cruz, where Us’s new Hands Across America demonstration starts, was not actually on the original route, though it seems appropriate in 2019, since the Bay Area is having a rather public reckoning with its housing and poverty crises.)

But even without all that context, I should have realized it for a very simple reason: Us is, at least in part, a home invasion film, and every single home invasion film ever made – don’t @ me – is, at least in part, about class and inequality. By their very nature. Wealthyish protagonists have homes – typically very nice, secluded ones. Then less affluent folks go to those homes and make them pay for their extravagance.

As a result, these films are pretty much always about white people – because white people have all the wealth. Even in Us, which focuses on a clearly comfortable black family, there’s a notable disparity in that level of comfort. The Wilsons are doing fine, but their vacation home ain’t got nothing on the Tylers. When the power goes out, the Wilsons are plunged into darkness. They can run to their boat, but that boat is only semi-functional. They feel they can call the police, but aren’t taken all that seriously and given far too long a wait.

And, of course, Adelaide is put in handcuffs in her own home. By the shadow that wants her and her family to suffer.

Not so with the Tylers. There is only a momentary blip as the power is cut and the generator kicks in – even their smart assistant keeps on keeping on. And when their doppelgangers come, it’s quick and nearly painless – except for Elizabeth Moss, because women always have it worse in horror movies, don’t they?

But it’s not the racial wealth gap specifically that drives Us’s narrative; it’s this country’s as a whole. Before handing over those cuffs, Red tells the Wilsons who they are: “Americans.” The film’s title is often stylized with both letters capitalized, and so it should be: the United States itself is the thread that binds everyone together, the one that the Tethered have come to sever.

And to finally escape the cramped, crowded tunnels long since forgotten by the people who built them; the Tethered see no sun or trees; breathe no fresh air. They eat nothing but raw rabbit. They are always underneath: out of sight and out of mind.

Growing up, both of my parents worked in organizations dedicated to helping those in poverty or the homeless. As such, our dinner conversations often focused on these issues. But even so, I often just forgot about those people when I was living my generally middle-class lifestyle in a town that had some absurd wealth of its own.

Jeremiah 11 foretells violence against the people who have turned their back on the god who gave them the land flowing with milk and honey – that followed false idols who will do nothing to save them from the coming calamity. And what are these gods? America itself, for one; that image that we have of ourselves as compassionate or caring, or had before November 2016.

Money in general and capitalism in particular are often considered false idols, and certainly the economic system that makes it damn near impossible for people at the bottom of the ladder to rise up seems that it must come to an inflection point. Will that be a revolution? Will it require the mass slaughter of elites? Jeremiah may have felt so.

And the violence that he foretold is as brutal as promised.

Us’s big twist, that the Adelaide Wilson we have been following since the shift to present day was not the same Adelaide Wilson we saw in 1986 but her shadow, is metaphorically effective while being literally nonsensical. It isn’t like the reveal comes entirely out of nowhere; there are moments where her behavior is much closer to the one demonstrated by the shadows, which raised the question long before it was answered.

But Red’s monologues about both the nature of The Tethered and also their relationship don’t really make sense when Red/real Adelaide was not actually born into that life. I have wrestled with this since literally the montage reveal, because it felt like Us was trying to have its cake and eat it too. It had intentionally misdirected me where the rest of the film had seemed honest. Look, the mechanics of the Tethered as demonstrated in that carnival sequence are confusing enough as it is and fall apart with the slightest questioning, but the scene itself to be effective enough that I didn’t care.

However, if the link is between the original and its tether – and it’s a one-way link, by what system does a shadow going aboveground suddenly take control? The Tethered do more depressing versions of the things that their real iterations are doing. They appear to know in real time the thoughts of their counterparts and therefore share their memories. Is that just a result of whomever is belowground? How does actually real Adelaide still know where actually fake Adelaide is going to be in order to block her way with that burning car *after* the Tethered have left their tunnels?

There are a hundred questions you can use to poke holes in all of this, and I understand the impulse to do so. I did it. But really, what we should do is consider the metaphor. And what it means that the Tethered’s prophet, the one who was able to bring the downtrodden to the surface to take on the elites was herself an elite stolen by one of the downtrodden who was then able to exist as an elite.

And so it becomes a question of nature vs nurture. Are people in an upper caste by their very existence better than the people in a lower one? Or is it the environment that they grow up in that makes them succeed (or fail)? Us falls unequivocally on nurture… but in a way that almost both-sides-y way.

Nurture is obvious: after the initial treatment period, Shadow Adelaide was able to become Adelaide proper. She becomes a functional member of society. There are, of course, moments where her past self comes out, as the lasting effects of her early trauma will never fully recede – and the impact of that trauma on the Tethered as a whole is deeply relevant to this conversation about upward mobility but is not something I am going to delve into here.

But even more than that, it took someone from the aboveground to come and teach the underground how to rise up. Shadow Adelaide steals a spot in the sun instead of helping the people around her. And the Tethered knew quickly that her counterpart was special, even if they didn’t know why. She had seemingly innate talents that those born Tethered lacked. She could survive there without being completely consumed.

Which, ya know, sounds a bit like “nature.”

But I think, to give Peele the benefit of the doubt – as I must we do share an alma mater, after all – that this is saying those formative years aboveground were enough to create a foundation that couldn’t be broken by poverty – though Adelaide was still young, she was old enough.

So what is this saying about the social ladder? Perhaps that society is zero sum. That one person can only get ahead if another person is made to suffer in their stead? Certainly there are people who feel that way, though they do so in service of those empty deities.

Or maybe that everyone just needs to be given opportunity to do great things.

That one person can change the world.

All of them. None of them.

The final confrontation between the two Adelaides feels a bit like Roy Batty’s bizzare battle with Rick Deckard, full of monologuing at and toying with our protagonist until it’s time for them to die.

But though she fails to bring her shadow family to the world that she was born into she succeeds in her larger plan of showing the world the strength of the people she was forced to join but chose to save.

That final helicopter shot is reminiscent of the ending of Karyn Kusama’s cult-horror film The Invitation, as the survivors of the Jonestown-style poisoning look out onto the hills and see them lit up by the red that signals a successful sacrifice. But that moment never worked for me; what could have been powerful is instead completely absurd.

On its face, all the now-untethered in their red outfits, hand in hand over the hills beyond the horizon should be equally absurd… but it’s not. It is so powerful. To see these people, these humans, Americans, long since forgotten. They have shown themselves in a literally biblical display of violence.

The world will know them, and it can never go back to the way that it was.

Jordan Peele’s Us Works Until It Doesn’t – Review #31.1

In the center of the opening shot of Jordan Peele’s second feature, Us, is a CRT TV. A clearly current commercial about the 1986 Hands Across America charity event plays, then one about the Santa Cruz beach and boardwalk. Cut to: a carnival.

Years of making basic associations led me to the conclusion that we were in 1986 Santa Cruz. And just as I started to feel good about having understood this obvious transition, and the film trusting me to have understood said transition, a location title showed up on screen: 1986, Santa Cruz.

I audibly groaned.

Hello and welcome to The Week I Review. My name is An American, and today I’m splitting up my duties in order to properly talk about Jordan Peele’s following up to his smash-hit Get Out. This video that you’re watching right now is a review – and a spoiler-free one at that. Regular viewers may notice that it’s atypically short for this channel; that’s because I’m also posting a second video: a deeper dive that grapples with the things that Us is saying and also wants to say. Anyone can watch this one; only those who have seen it through should watch that one.

So. Us.

The only thing I knew going in was what I heard from the theatrical trailer, during which I was able to close my eyes but not my ears: there is a family, and then another family that looks just like that family shows up to, like, Funny Games them or something. That’s not necessarily wrong, though it’s certainly incomplete. But I’m glad that I looked away when the trailers came on, because the images that accompanied that bit of explanatory dialogue contained a shocking amount of very-late-in-the-film footage. In fact, there’s less in the trailer from Us’s first twenty minutes than there is from its last.

Plus, the way the trailer’s cut together just doesn’t do a great job of conveying what Us really is. I went in expecting a straight-up horror film, as did my two movie-going companions. The woman who would have been our fourth decided not to come, because it seemed too scary.

But I knew something was off from the spread of trailers that played before the film. I actually commented out loud about this at the time; you can learn a lot about what theaters expect a film’s audience to be based on the associated marketing. A typical horror movie shows trailers for horror movies, possibly some sci-fi/action stuff too.

But not Us. Sure, there were three of those: Pet Sematary, Midsommar, and Ma, but the others went in some radically different directions: Olivia Wilde’s coming-of-age comedy Booksmart. That movie about a KKK member becoming friends with a black activist. The Natalie Portman-led space drama Lucy in the Sky. The teaser for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

This points to a genuine confusion on the part of the person selecting trailers for who exactly Us is for. And it led me to recalibrate a little bit. Maybe it wasn’t going to be really scary after all. And… I was right. As it turns out, the trailer actually has more jump scares than the movie does. There is only one big NOISE-AND-MOVEMENT-EVENT in the entirety of Us, which is the exact number that I’m okay with. Instead, the film prefers quieter, more unnerving moments. And it is *much* more effective for that.

But it’s also really funny – in a more consistent way than its predecessor. Get Out’s incredible opening shot blended both horror and comedy in just a tour-de-force introduction to Peele as a filmmaker, but after that the tone becomes segmented: When Lil Rel Howery’s Rod is onscreen, it’s comedy; when he’s not, it’s drama.

Us makes good on the promise of Get Out’s opening by integrating comedy into the horror. Rather than having a single comic relief as the B-Plot, the Wilson family itself is funny, cracking jokes even as awful things are happening. Much more often than not, the jokes land, and even when they didn’t I deeply respected the commitment to threading humor so deeply into such a dark narrative.

Which is to say that Us is bolder and more confident than Get Out – an already bold and confident movie. And that permeates the film, particularly in its visuals, which are an absolute treat. Get Out’s aesthetic worked for its story, but Us is so much more… alive. Camera, lighting, production design, costuming – everything is so on point. I loved every frame.

But I’m conflicted, because the film takes a turn that I think doesn’t work on the terms that it has set out for itself with its revelations about the nature of the doppelgangers. The metaphorical meaning is clear and powerful… but if you try to take basically anything from the last, like, fifteen minutes literally, you’re just going to give yourself a migraine.

And it’s particularly frustrating because I feel like I had a handle on things the whole film. I got the call backs, figured out the set ups, and was thoroughly satisfied by the pay-offs. Even those revelations themselves are set up in ways that answer questions I had had within the film. And yet I still felt cheated – like it was actively hiding things from me just so it could get a “!!!” before the rapid turn to “???”

And it made me mad. Because this movie should be better than that. And so I’ve half-convinced myself that it is better than that, resulting in me spending most waking minutes – and some sleeping, if my nightmares are to be believed – between then and now trying to explain it to myself, to convince myself that I’m being dumb and not the movie. Because I want that to be the case. I just… don’t think it is. The best I can hope for, then, is that on subsequent watches, I’ll just be okay with it. That happened with Get Out, actually, which I also felt overextended itself with some of the sci-fi elements… but maybe I won’t.

So what am I supposed to say? On so many levels, Us is a triumph, yet it left a bad taste in my mouth. So I can’t love it the way I feel I should…

But I can still like it a heckuva lot. And that I definitely do.

Seven Point Nine out of Ten

Spring Breakers Was (Five Years) Ahead of Its Time – Review #30

“After four college girls rob a restaurant to fund their spring break in Florida, they get entangled with a weird dude with his own criminal agenda.”

Comedies, Dark Comedies

Umm…

Look, I get it. Some films are difficult to describe – let alone with just 26 words. And we all know that accurate synopses are not Netflix’s highest priority… but this one is pretty bad. Both because it misleadingly connects two entirely unrelated events in the movie, and because it seems to have been written by someone who thinks that flippancy is inherently clever.

It’s not.

“comedies, dark comedies”

Maybe whomever it was who wrote that description just deeply, deeply misunderstood what they had seen.

In this hypothetical Netflix synopsizer’s defense, it’s not hard to misunderstand Spring Breakers, a movie that follows four young women who spend more time in bikinis than not. A movie that opens with topless men and women living their best lives on a spring break beach, as Skrillex’s Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites wub wubs over it all.

A power fantasy where guns never run out of bullets.

A few months ago, I showed Spring Breakers to my currently-in-college sister, and she really fixated on that last bit in the same way that the film is fixated on guns in general.

There are a lot of guns, real and fake, in Spring Breakers. At first, they’re impressions of suicidal imagery. The girls are locked into their boring college lives; they point finger guns at their heads and pull imaginary triggers. Brit drinks from the barrel of a loaded squirt gun.

Scenes transition with the sounds of guns cocking. They echo across the soundscape. Even when you don’t see them, you feel them. And then all of a sudden, they’re everywhere. And they are everything.

Spring Breakers understands the truly fetishistic relationship that America has with guns – the way that their killing power has been sexualized by our culture. And the camera loves the guns just as much as it loves the girls holding them. What starts off feeling like a lost Girls Gone Wild tape ends up a fever dream symphony of sex and violence just daring you, the viewer, to get swept up.

But the actual construction of the film makes it very difficult to do that. I haven’t seen many genuinely good films that were more clearly formed in the edit than Spring Breakers. Of course, every film is made three times: on the page, on set, in the edit, but a movie like this can only exist with hindsight. No one, not even Harmony Korine, could have known what Spring Breakers would become.

And I’m not just saying that in some pathetic attempt to sound insightful; I know it for an actual fact, because I read the script. You can too; A24’s original link is gone but I’ll point you in the proper direction down below. I highly recommend it if you have seen the film, because it really does show just how much can change. The imagery, by and large, is intact – I would call Korine’s descriptions “grotesquely evocative” – but the context is oh so different.

Scenes are in different order, or even on top of each other. There are flashes forward and backward. Dialogue is repeated, but with different inflections – pulled, I assume, from multiple takes given different direction. These are not in the script; indeed, most of the dialogue in the film appears to have been improvised, because there’s a whole lot less on the page and the stuff that is there feels a lot less… human? I dunno, it’s pretty awkward. It’s good they were allowed to riff.

But that doesn’t really come across. Those strange edits sometimes feel almost arbitrary in the moment, but taken collectively they are so goshdarn impactful, because they serve the broader purpose that makes Spring Breakers so unforgettable: It is telling you a lie while showing you the truth.

This is not unique to Spring Breakers, but Spring Breakers does it uniquely well. It’s worth noting that there was a metatextual aspect to Spring Breakers at the time of its release that is lost now. Back then, putting Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, and Vanessa Hudgens in roles like this was scandalous. To some, it might have felt like they were overcompensating for kid-friendly images by taking part in this very-not-kid-friendly film. Indeed, them and Rachel Korine, wife of the writer/director

– which, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge is so freaking strange –

were co-nominated for the Alliance of Women Film Journalist’s “Actress Most in Need of a New Agent” award that year, though they ultimately lost to Cameron Diaz for The Counselor.

Time has now passed, and images have changed. It’s not so strange that these actors would play these roles. Let’s be honest: they’re flawless casting choices. Every one of the four characters is perfectly realized, with Vanessa Hudgens as Candy I think being the particular standout.

Spring Breakers takes these four attractive young women, puts them in bikinis, and then lets them loose into debauchery. It is objectifying them in the context of their own story. And if you turned the sound off, you might think that was all it was doing.

But then you listen to Gomez’s Faith calling her grandmother and talking about how beautiful the thing you’re seeing is, how she wishes they could go together – what a wonderful time. In the script, there’s a knowing smile but it is played perfectly straight onscreen, and it’s far more effective for that change. Because it’s Faith’s own conviction in the magic of the Florida beaches that shows how horrific everything is. The sound both adds the necessary drama to make the scene function and makes clear that the celebratory imagery itself is not so celebratory at all. It’s gross, and it knows it. All that ogling the camera is doing starts to feel more like an attack on the audience, again, a dare to get caught up in everything before it all comes crashing down.

The spell begins to break even before the introduction of James Franco’s Alien, a genuinely terrible rapper whose actual business is drugs and murder. He bails the girls out from prison after they’re arrested alongside two of his own posse at a particularly crazy Spring Break party, which had nothing to do with a chicken shop robbery, and he just wants them to be with him. They’re attractive and in need; he wants to be their knight in shining armor. And in return, they get Spring Break… Forever. But the reality of that is terrifying and dangerous.

One gets scared. Another gets hurt; they go back to their old lives, despite Alien’s protests. The remaining girls hug them goodbye, and then they board a bus and and watch the world go by from what I can only assume is I-95.

In the end, there are only the true believers, and they herald in a new kind of truth. A “Future is Female” kind of truth, as Brit and Candy show the world that nothing will stop them from living in Spring Break Forever. The film becomes their dream, as they ascend to power using the tools at their disposal, both natural and man-made. And it’s glorious. Which is why I think Spring Breakers’ biggest problem was its release date. Had this film come out in, say, 2017 instead of 2013, I think the conversation around it would have been very, very different. And much more interesting.

Because Spring Breakers feels like a movie of the current age, one that feeds into the chaotic and angry world that we are living in now – one that points a literal gun at the male gaze while still fully embracing it. It’s a big, beautiful mess of a film that demands and rewards repeat viewings.

And I love it. I love it so much.

9.5 out of 10.

Climax is Gaspar Noe’s Best Since Irreversible (I Hated It!) – Review #29

“Well, that was crap,” said a middle-aged man wearing what appeared to be full-on goggles as the lights came up in the theater. It’s odd that we’re still there at that point. One would typically have headed out as soon as the credits began… but this is a Gaspar Noe film. Those closing credits are the opening credits, seamlessly flowed to from the minutes-long opening shot of a bleeding woman crawling through perfect white snow.

There are actual opening credits too, but they take place about an hour in. So fun.

Gaspar Noe is one of the most interesting directors working today. He’s hardly prolific – having only made five features in 20 years, with some shorts in between – but every release feels like an event. For him, style is substance, and he’s got style to spare, all of which is used to push the boundaries of acceptibility.

His first film, I Stand Alone, feels like a warm-up, clearing his throat with some almost comedically nihilistic philosophy. It was the next, Irreversible, that shot him into the collective consciousness by depicting a nine-minute-long rape with an unbroken, unmoving camera – among other horrors. Seven years later, Enter the Void meditated on life and death in a DMT-fueled psychosexual nightmare full of unforgettable imagery. His next, Love, had a quarter of the budget, and so went in a more, um, intimate direction with scenes of actual, as in unsimulated, sex, including a moment of ejaculation straight at the screen.

Also, it’s in 3D.

Climax, fittingly, is a culmination of everything that has come before. Eighteen dancers come to an isolated location to work on a performance that they will then travel beyond France’s borders. Perhaps even to America.

The bulk of the film takes place a few days into their stay. After a routine run through, they have a party. Someone spikes the celebratory sangria with LSD. All hell breaks loose.

But where Enter the Void takes you along for the trip, Climax keeps you out of it.

I’ve been sober for… 27 years; I have never intentionally ingested alcohol or anything else of that sort. But I have been around intoxicated people – perhaps not on LSD, at least to my knowledge, but I can say that Climax captures the discomfort of being someone who’s just a bit more aware of a situation than everyone else. I don’t think this was intentional, to be honest; I don’t know if Gaspar Noe knows what it’s like to be the sober one, and it seems to me that the disorienting camerawork was intended to bring the viewer into the experience, but there’s a clear line between the way Enter the Void depicts DMT and Climax does LSD. Now, Quora tells me that this is because DMT is a whole other level of hallucinogen

– and Google probably now thinks I’m looking to start checking out alternate planes of consciousness –

but the Irreversible-esque camerawork in constant motion better represents the overall uneasiness of the situation than it does any given person’s experience. This is more appropriate, though, as the camera moves throughout the characters, not all of whom had the sangria, while trying to keep you up to date on their statuses in a movie that barely passes the 90-minute mark. This section of the film appears as a single take, eventually resulting in an intimate familiarity with the space. This is the area where the light changes colors. That is where you hear the screaming child locked in a room. You start to remember where characters are only to be shocked when they appear elsewhere.

And this is where Climax is at its most effective, because it feels as though the camera could have just as easily given its primary focus to other characters without really compromising the overall impact of the narrative. Despite having so many characters, they’ve all got clearly defined personalities and feel like people who are doing actual things even when they’re not onscreen. Everyone is introduced in a series of interviews, presented on an on-screen television surrounded by reading and viewing materials. To the left are books; the right are VHS tapes.

The tapes include Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Hara Kiri, Possession, Suspiria, and the like. I wasn’t really able to see what the books said, because the film is in French and I was trying to pay attention to the subtitles and couldn’t do both – but the word “Suicide” stuck out, as did the name Fritz Lang. Watching the trailer, you can see some of this. However, the aspect ratio is wrong, and much of the sides are cut off. I guess he doesn’t want you to see his Salo-esque “Essential Bibliography” until you get into the theater.

But these gave me a lot to think about during the slower portions of Climax, and there are many. That interview section feels like an eternity even if it is probably closer to ten minutes long. Following the big dance number – which is very impressive – is an exhausting amount of singles dancing and then a bunch of two-shots ripped straight from Love as characters talk about whatever gross or dumb thing they’re interested in amidst jarring cuts to black.

Fortunately, this is Noe’s first time in 16 years working with competent actors. The biggest failings of both Enter the Void and Love are that its performers are genuinely bad – especially the protagonist in whose head you spend… most of each film (the former more literally than the latter). You can tell that he’s working with professionals here solely by the amount of clothing that the majority of the characters keep wearing throughout. There are a couple of folks willing to sign nudity clauses, but far more who won’t; that would have been a deal-breaker for Love, but Noe clearly cared more about performance here. And good, because it is all about the performance. Unfortunately, I just didn’t care about at least two-thirds of them.

So while they were keeping on keeping on, I thought about other things: like Suspiria, and mother!, his earlier films, but the oddest one I kept coming back to was the music video for Sia’s “The Greatest.” If you haven’t seen it, you really, really should; it’s a great song inspired by the Pulse night club shooting in Orlando, and it has a video to match – one full of dancing and emotion and, of course, death. I don’t watch that much dance, so my points of reference are pretty limited, but if you told me that the choreographer of Climax was the same person who puts together Maddy Ziegler’s little Sia dances, I’d believe it. Here that feels particularly true, as so many others are involved. And hell, that video’s final group scene takes place in a room lit in green and red.

Honestly, if you watch the video for The Greatest, you’ve seen like 80% of what Climax has to offer. Maybe more.

Which is perhaps the oddest thing of all about this movie: it doesn’t really stand out. Even though it is overtly a Gaspar Noe film, it has none of that unique or interesting transgression that defined his earlier work. Other people could have made this movie – and indeed have made movies much like it. Climax instead turns inward, reflecting on his ouvre, pulling direct inspiration from his own earlier styles and attempting to fit them into one film. It doesn’t work. The nauseating, seemingly unbroken camera of Irreversible mixes as well with the frankly boring conversational style of Love as oil with water. Juxtaposing them highlights this incompatibility. Climax, then, feels like a series of shorts starring the same actors that have been grafted onto each other.

It may be new for the director that the closest thing Climax has to a protagonist is a woman, but that hardly feels like a revelation. His male characters are still pigs, and they’re given so much time to spout their piggishness. It made me wish that I was watching this at home, where I could fast forward through the nonsense before getting into that last thirty minutes or so.

Still, I don’t really agree with the man in the goggles who sat behind me. When he came into the theater during that same dumb trailer for The Curse of La Llorona that I’ve seen fifteen times, he loudly proclaimed “You’re in my seat” to whomever was already there. Clearly, not a man who cared much about the people around him. I bet he would have been even louder if the movie had already started.

But I understand both why he felt that way and why he needed to verbalize it to this room of strangers, because there is no way to not have a visceral reaction to this movie – also evidenced by the multiple walkouts. And no two reactions will be quite the same: there are so many reasons to hate this movie, though each could just as easily be a reason to love it for a certain type of person. I’m not one of them, but I get it.

Because I have a genuine appreciation for some of what Climax does. It has flashes of brilliance that, though they are overshadowed by the much longer spells of aggressively anti-audience blather, I can’t help but respect.

And so for the hilarity of it:

Six Point Nine out of Ten.