Ending Explained: Climax

💡 What does the ending really mean?

At the end of Climax, the police find the boarding school in chaos with several dead and injured, while Lou walks out laughing into the snow. In a final twist, Psyché applies more LSD to her eye after continuing to dance alone.

What happens at the end

The situation at the boarding school degenerates into total violence and chaos under the effects of the hallucinogen. Omar is locked out and freezes to death. Emmanuelle locks her son Tito in an electrical room to protect him, but loses the key and he is electrocuted, leading Emmanuelle to commit suicide out of grief. Dom brutally attacks Lou, who has a breakdown and self-harms with a knife while the group encourages her to kill herself. David is assaulted by another dancer who smashes his head against the floor, after being caught having incestuous relations with his sister Gazelle, who suffers an epileptic seizure.

When the police arrive the next morning, the building is a scene of tragedies. Tito's corpse and Emmanuelle's lifeless body mark the death toll, while other characters lie unconscious or wounded. Dom sobs curled up in a ball and Jennifer screams while pouring water over her burned scalp. Lou walks out laughing uncontrollably and writhes in the snow. Eva is curled up naked in the shower, Daddy comforts Riley in her bed, and Selva rests embracing Ivana. In a final twist, Psyché—whose bag contained books on hallucinogens—enters her room and applies more LSD drops directly into her eye after continuing to dance alone.

What it means

Gaspar Noé treats us to another one of his usual exercises in gratuitous cruelty disguised as modern art, where the collective nightmare functions as a crude metaphor for the loss of social control. The premise of the anonymous drugging strips the characters of any trace of civilization in a matter of minutes, reducing them to beasts guided by panic and lysergic delirium. It is the triumph of empty provocation, a carousel of excesses where human suffering is filmed with sadistic enjoyment to shock the bourgeois spectator.

What is left open

The film does not reveal who exactly spiked the sangria with the hallucinogen, leaving the identity of the person responsible for unleashing all the chaos up in the air.