The end is near in the first trail­er for Gas­par Noé’s death dra­ma Vortex

The films of provo­ca­teur Gas­par Noé have primed us to expect a few things from each new one: sud­den jags of vio­lence, some deviant sex stuff, pound­ing elec­tron­ic music, crazed exper­i­ments with col­or and cam­era move­ment. With his lat­est fea­ture Vor­tex, he does the last thing that could still shock peo­ple and does away with all of it, going for a more sedate reg­is­ter than his career has ever seen before.

The first trail­er for Vor­tex, uploaded just this morn­ing, offers an impres­sion of the qui­eter, stiller, alto­geth­er more dialed-back tone that Noé has unex­pect­ed­ly adopt­ed. Though it’s not as if he’s gone soft or any­thing – the sub­ject of what crit­ics have called his ten­der­est film is death, the ter­ri­fy­ing void wait­ing for us all at the end of life.

The Ital­ian film­mak­ing mas­ter Dario Argen­to and Françoise Lebrun (of The Moth­er and the Whore fame, among many, many oth­ers) por­tray a cou­ple well into their twi­light years, their declin­ing men­tal and phys­i­cal health por­tend­ing that they’re not long for this world. As they reck­on with the ter­ri­fy­ing real­i­ty of their own mor­tal­i­ty, their inabil­i­ty to care for them­selves puts the onus of respon­si­bil­i­ty on their son (Alex Lutz), who starts to chafe under his new posi­tion as cus­to­di­an to his help­less parents.

The set­up may sound famil­iar to those of you who have seen Michael Haneke​‘s Amour, which also con­sid­ered the hor­ror of noth­ing­ness lying in the great beyond and tasked a put-upon adult child with sort­ing through the emo­tion­al wreck­age. In this case, how­ev­er, Noé dis­tin­guish­es him­self with an odd for­mal tech­nique on dis­play in the clip below, in which the screen is split in half with two pan­els — in some shots, they divide up a sin­gle frame, and in oth­ers, they con­trast two dif­fer­ent images.

Reviews from ear­ly show­ings on the fes­ti­val cir­cuit have been round­ly pos­i­tive, with many prais­ing Noé’s gear-shift as a step toward matu­ri­ty. But for those loy­al­ists who specif­i­cal­ly appre­ci­at­ed the direc­tor for his insou­ciance bor­der­ing on the ado­les­cent, the lack of out­ré wild­ness may be a sore sport. Would it be so much to ask to see the 81-year-old Argen­to tak­ing ecsta­sy at a rave turned homicidal?

Vor­tex comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 29 April, and then the UK on 13 May.