Vortex is the most significant, life-affirming piece of cinema to emerge from this pandemic age. To those who might approach the film with an inherent cynicism due to Gaspar Noé’s reputation as a provocateur, I urge you to set aside your judgement. “It’s not a horror movie,” Noé explained in an introduction to the film at its West Coast Premiere on October 8th, “This movie is made for crying […] it’s a serious, serious movie.”
In both its slow-burn form and the visual aesthetic style of the film, Vortex is set apart from Noé’s usual bright, disorienting displays of mayhem and madness – but this does not mean that Vortex operates in an uncomplimentary or clashing manner. If the psychedelics of Enter the Void, Climax, and Lux Æterna are representative of internal mania, then Vortex is the low depression that follows.
Noé’s artistry has always captured the mundane – the unremarkable, small day-to-day moments which most define the experience of human life and personhood. In Vortex, he reproduces this quintessential essence of living to masterful effect, perfecting the art of realism to the point of near-documentary precision. Through Noé’s characteristic long takes, we follow Father (Dario Argento) and Mother (Françoise Lebrun) as they wake up in the morning, select their clothes, get dressed, put on coffee, use the bathroom – seemingly without break; the audience remains with the film’s two characters during their every moment of living, regardless of life’s uneventful nature.
Argento and Lebrun wholly embody their roles with a powerful skill and precision. Through an innovative and dedicated use of split screen throughout the entirety of the film, Noé frames Argento and Lebrun alongside each other, constantly within the audience’s field of view. Through this split screen pairing with Noé’s long takes, the lives of Father and Mother are experienced simultaneously in real-time. Their lives are meditative and largely silent, overlapping while also drifting apart. By force of form and style, Argento and Lebrun work both as a couple and as wholly separate beings who each experience the slow deterioration of life with age in individual ways. They act both with and against each other expertly in a slow-burn melodrama that plays across Father and Mother’s final moments of life.
The sense of loss that permeates throughout the final act of the film is profound, emphasised by Noé’s split screen effect. Where two lives had once filled the frames, one half sits empty, containing only blackness. Vortex, however, is not nihilistic in its core philosophy; it simply stays with those who are living, left behind.Vortex is dedicated “to all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts.”
