Director: Gaspar Noé
Writer: Gaspar Noé
Stars: Sofia Boutella, Romain Guillermic, Souheila Yacoub
1 hour, 37 minutes
We see a half-dressed girl walking through the snow. She falls down and scream hysterically, rolling around in the snow. She leaves a trail of blood behind her as she crawls on. Then she stops, frozen or bled to death, we don’t know.
Credits Roll. Very weird and far-too-detailed credits. It’s a great-wall-of text-kinda-credits. Actually, these are the end credits, showing now for artsy-fartsy reasons.
We cut to a video of girls being interviewed, and next to the TV we see a pile of videotapes- Suspiria, Possession, Schizophrenia, Harakiri, and some others. If these films have influenced this one, and they have, then already I have serious doubts about this one…
We start out with a collection of young people being interviewed about dancing. “What would you do? How far would you go? What would you do f you couldn’t dance?” And typical interview questions like that. They get asked about drugs, and most of them said they didn’t do that.
After the video interviews are over, the actual Credits Roll.
We cut to a dance studio with many people dancing. These are clearly the same people we just saw in the video interviews, and they are actually very good dancers. We see them all do their thing, and it’s a very entertaining dance scene. Afterwards, there’s a little party, and they all congratulate each other. There’s a child there, but he’s specifically not allowed to drink the sangria; most everyone else has some.
One of the girls says “This is not a good place for a kid,” but everything looks pretty wholesome for the most part. The same girl asks,”You ever have an abortion?” “It’s good to have the choice,” her friend answers. It’s an odd conversation, but it foreshadows things to come. A little later, someone mentions that the girl is pregnant. Meanwhile, the little boy Tito is upstairs being put to bed.
One dancer mentions that this is supposedly a “safe place” where it’s OK to take drugs. There is a girl there, snorting coke, and some of the dancers judge her negatively. A lot of them are judging each other for one thing or another. We spend about fifteen minutes watching various small groups talk about each other and their relationships. The little boy’s mother says the best thing she ever did was to make that sangria.
Then we switch to an overhead view of them dancing, mostly one-at-a-time in a circle, for ten minutes or so.
Then more credits roll. I think they’re messing with us now.
We get a closeup of the sangria as the party starts to wind down. Several of the dancers mention they are feeling funny. “Something’s kicking in,” one guys says. One girl stops dancing and just pees in the middle of the dance floor.
Selva asks the sangria woman, “What have you done?” Sangria woman doesn’t understand. She hasn’t done anything, she says. Everyone is acting really strange now and hardly dancing at all. They all realize the sangria’s been spiked… with LSD. Omar said he didn’t drink any, so They blame Omar, and lock him outside in the snowstorm. The little boy, Tito, comes downstairs, takes a big drink, and his mother locks him in the electrical closet.
The pregnant girl didn’t drink anything, but she’s sick too, because pregnant. She gets kicked in the gut when someone finds out she didn’t drink. Another girl sets herself on fire. Between the sick girl, the screaming child and the burning girl, there’s a lot of screaming going on now. There’s nobody sober enough to help anyone else. They all join together and chant for the sober, pregnant girl to cut herself up with a knife, which she does.
Selva then freaks out all by herself in a scene very reminiscent of that one in Possession only with a lot more screaming. She eventually comes upon the little boy behind the locked door who is now having his own drug-fueled hallucinations and is both seeing things and screaming. It’s a rough night for a six-year-old! The power goes out and someone yells, “Oh Shit– Tito’s been fried!” Of course, the mother has lost the key to the electrical room, so no one can open the door to check on him.
As things continue, the lighting gets more and more colorful, and things take on a funhouse, mazelike quality. Things start quieting down as people pair off and have rough sex or just lay there twitching or passed out.
The next morning, the police show up and find things in a mess. We see that Tito’s mother is dead from guilt-suicide, the pregnant girl walked out into the snow and froze to death, the brother and sister learned the joys of incest, and lastly, we find out who it was that spiked the punch. Little Tito’s laying in the electrical room, and we still don’t know if he’s dead or sleeping it off.
Lastly, the title of the movie shows up. The end.
Commentary
The film had a 5-page script, and the actors were told to improvise. Apart from the first big dance scene, everything else was improvised and shot in chronological order. Actually, the second half of the movie is almost entirely one long, unbroken take.
The main moral of the story seems to be, if your mother tells you to go to bed, you should stay there and not come back to the party.
For the first hour, I was really starting to doubt this would venture into horror territory, but it definitely did. It’s a different kind of horror, but it’s definitely in the realm. There was little to no real “plot” here, but the character interactions create a story for most of the characters. It’s not going to be for everyone, but I was surprisingly mesmerized by the whole thing.