Vor­tex

Gas­par Noé is one of the fore­most pur­vey­ors of feel bad cin­e­ma, hav­ing built a suc­cess­ful career off of his love of mak­ing audi­ences squirm. His ear­li­er work, notably Irréversible, Enter the Void and Cli­max, is filled with explic­it, vis­cer­al images depict­ing human­i­ty at its most chaot­ic. Watch­ing these films, you get the impres­sion he rel­ish­es putting us, much like his char­ac­ters, through the prover­bial wringer.

By com­par­i­son, Vor­tex is a pos­i­tive­ly mori­bund affair. An ago­nis­ing­ly slow-paced por­trait of age­ing in all its inglo­ri­ous banal­i­ty, it cen­tres on an elder­ly cou­ple (played by Dario Argen­to and Françoise Lebrun, whose names are accom­pa­nied by their respec­tive birth years in the open­ing cred­its) liv­ing out their last days in a clut­tered apart­ment in Paris.

Lui, a self-con­fessed hoard­er, is writ­ing a book on cin­e­ma, dreams and mem­o­ry, while Elle, a retired psy­chi­a­trist, is strug­gling with demen­tia. We see their dai­ly rou­tines play out in par­al­lel as both attempt to pre­serve some sem­blance of nor­mal­cy in the face of Elle’s wors­en­ing condition.

The film’s split-screen for­mat means our focus con­stant­ly switch­es from one frame to the oth­er, study­ing the mis­cel­lany of items the cou­ple have amassed over the course of their mar­riage. Yet, despite the lived-in nature of their domi­cile, there is very lit­tle infor­ma­tion about these char­ac­ters to be gleaned from scan­ning their surroundings.

Beyond a few light expo­si­tion­al details, we’re giv­en almost no insight into who these peo­ple are, or the rich and inter­est­ing lives they must have lived. They are more or less blank can­vas­es onto which Noé projects his anx­i­eties about his own mor­tal­i­ty. (In 2020 the direc­tor suf­fered a near fatal brain haem­or­rhage, from which he has ful­ly recovered.)

Vor­tex briefly gains some nar­ra­tive momen­tum when Lui and Elle’s son Stéphane (Alex Lutz) drops in to check on his ail­ing folks, but much of the film’s near two-and-a-half-hour run­time is spent qui­et­ly observ­ing the cou­ple as their phys­i­cal and men­tal health steadi­ly declines.

For long stretch­es, time sim­ply pass­es in this oxy­gen­less lim­i­nal space. It’s an odd­ly com­pelling, if at times uncom­fort­ably voyeuris­tic, view­ing expe­ri­ence – like star­ing at a pho­to­graph of two strangers whose faces are fad­ing away.

If this is Noé at his most com­pas­sion­ate and vul­ner­a­ble, it’s telling that Vor­tex ulti­mate­ly lacks the raw emo­tion­al impact of Michael Haneke​’s Amour, anoth­er bru­tal­ly hon­est, skil­ful­ly act­ed cham­ber piece about demen­tia and death, or Flo­ri­an Zeller​’s more recent The Father. Like those films, this is an inti­mate, for­mal­ly inven­tive exam­i­na­tion of the cru­el­ties of old age, but there’s a detached qual­i­ty to Noé’s approach which, iron­i­cal­ly, may leave some view­ers cold.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, month­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.