Citizen Kane meets Sunset Boulevard, but with more dance numbers.

CLIMAX (2021) falls in the uneasy territory between quirky art film and loud and glitzy entertainer, being both a character study of the rise and fall of a wealthy eccentric, and a silly detective story in which the two big crimes are committed by different people, in the same room, about twenty minutes apart.

After a failed political campaign, eccentric multimillionaire Vijay Modi (Rajendra Prasad) has spent the last two years living in a hotel room, brooding and occasionally presiding over tawdry parties like an aging Jay Gatsby.  It's not exactly a life of solitude; in addition to the parties, Modi makes frequent talk show appearances to discuss his bizarre and often offensive statements on Twitter.  Still, Modi has separated himself from his businesses and his family; both his wives and their respective sons are staying at the family mansion, though he does pay them the occasional visit.

When he notices the young and beautiful Navya (Sasha Singh, looking a bit like a young Juhi Chawla) watching him, Modi is intrigued.  He thinks . . . well, it's pretty obvious what he thinks, but perhaps he also thinks he's found his Nick Carraway, since when he finally meets the young woman he offers her a great deal of money to stay the night and listen to his story and his philosophy of life.  Which he delivers as a freestyle rap, because it's that kind of movie. 

The next morning, Navya leaves in a hurry, and later that day Modi's body is discovered in the hotel room, badly mutilated.  The rest of the movie is a mystery, as the police explore Modi's history of cynical self-promotion, his brief (and self-financed) career as a movie star, the quick collapse of his political career as soon as people learned his political positions.  And then there's that mountain of debt and the nine life insurance policies taken out in the weeks before his death.

It's not a very hard mystery.  Everything hinges on the the mysterious woman who shut off the CCTV cameras, and once her identity becomes clear the solution is obvious.  That's not necessarily a problem, since the mystery is just an excuse to explore Modi's character.  

And that's the tricky part; the movie has to make us want to spend time with Modi.  And they do try - Prasad's performance is great, but Modi as presented is never as charming as he or the movie wants us to think he is, and he certainly isn't as profound as the movie pretends.  Most of his cynical platitudes sound like a moody teenager who has just discovered Ayn Rand, and while he sometimes stumbles into a reasonable opinion, "Children should take care of their aging parents" is not a stunning new insight.  CLIMAX is a well-executed character study about a character who really isn't that interesting.