Review - Vortex
To all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts…
Directed by: Gaspar Noé
Written by: Gaspar Noé
Starring: Dario Argento, Françoise Lebrun, Alex Lutz
Running Time: 142 minutes
Rating: 4/5
On the balcony of a Parisian apartment, an elderly couple quietly bask in the tranquility of the moment, reveling in their company and their wine. The camera slowly pans away from the couple as the credits begin to roll, the actors’ being introduced in placards with their personal birth dates listed beneath their name, a solemn reading, a reminder of life, death and the memories encapsulated in a name. The film’s opening title card serves as a hushed reminder of an unexplainable horror that hovers over our lives, both a cosmic echo of loneliness and the hand that feeds our fears and our subsequent disintegration of our personal identity. French provocateur, Gaspar Noé returns with Vortex, a visceral journey of spiraling destruction of our bodies, our minds and the identity of who we once were, who we are and the terrifying image of what we could become.
There is a sickness in the air, inexplicable, unexplainable but absolute in power and stature. Vortex’s most horrifying monster is not other people, supernatural beings or demons, but the unpredictability and uncontrollable force of the disintegration of mind, body and soul that is dementia. Inspired by his own personal experiences with his mother’s dementia and his own brush with death, Noé evokes a terrifying catharsis that revels in its quiet nature, even moreso than Florian Zeller’s The Father. While Zeller provokes the audience with conflict and the challenge of dementia in its protagonist, Noé prefers his audiences to be a part of the experience, a observer into a real-time breakdown of a mind at war with itself.
After its opening sequence, Noé transitions from the traditional single point of view, omniscient camera to Vortex’s most unique stylistic choice; a split-screen point of view that follows both the unnamed man (Dario Argento) and woman (Françoise LeBrun) in their everyday routine. While this choice can be argued as gimmicky, which to Noé’s standard is definitely expected given his filmography, the split-screen offers a deeply disturbing contrast between how the man and woman slowly begin to unravel and fall apart to a sickly disease. It is telling to note that while employing the split-screen, Noé frames his characters as if looking through a polaroid camera, arguably a nostalgic memory of life and pain. The man rambles on the telephone to a friend regarding a book he is writing, while the woman’s perspective is aimlessly wandering the cramped labyrinth of the apartment, not knowing what to do and how to sit still. A gas stove is left on unexplainably. A character begins to heave and struggle to breathe as the other sleeps. Noé cuts to and from moments in time with a jarring blink from the camera’s eyes. Shot in exceptionally long takes, Vortex employs a sense of realism in its portrayal of dementia, ageism, and loneliness; the film moves at a glacial pace, bound by its tracking shots of its pair of leads as they move to and from the confines of their apartment, seemingly entrapped by their own environment and their minds.
Let it be known, even in its quieter, more reflective nature, Vortex is definite in its structure, style, and content as a full-fledged Noé film. It may not be as violently blood-curling as Irreversible, as disillusioned as Enter the Void or as demented and ambitious as Climax; Vortex is still as disturbing, haunting, and visceral as the rest of Noé’s hellish filmography. There are no strobe lights, a pulsating soundtrack, or violent encounters. Vortex is exactly what Noé wants its to be – a wormhole of dread and an existential crisis of loneliness and morality. Reminiscent of its contemporaries in Haneke or Zeller, Noé is still as uncompromising as ever in his masterful vice grip of hopelessness and pain too impossible yet poignant to ignore.
We carve their name in stone. Carving their name keeps them alive.
Noé has created a relic that will serve as a reminder of an unspeakable truth and unbearable horror of dementia. Vortex is that tombstone.
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