Vortex

Gaspar Noé comes for your ageing parents in this pitiless yet emotionally powerful examination of fragile mortality (starring the Dario Argento).

A retired psychologist (played mournfully by Françoise Lebrun, The Mother and the Whore, MIFF 2014) is now lost in late-stage dementia. She should be in care, but her selfish film-critic husband (giallo legend Argento in his first, and apparently last, on-screen role) insists he can manage – although he has heart trouble, and seems more invested in finishing his long-gestating book. Meanwhile, their deadbeat son can’t (even) help himself, let alone his parents who are getting on in years. A split screen dramatises this fractured family: filmed separately, they shuffle around their cluttered, shabby Paris apartment towards an undignified end.

Debuting in 2021 as a Cannes Premiere title, Vortex is a change of pace for the French provocateur – whose past films include Climax (MIFF 2018), Love (MIFF 2015) and Enter the Void (MIFF 2010) – but maintains his interest in using formal experimentation to provoke and present viscerality, and to fiercely dramatise his characters’ interior states. If you felt Michael Haneke’s Amour (MIFF 2012) was too mild a portrait of elderly decline, settle in for this uncompromisingly forensic examination of human disconnection.

“An utterly sober experience, troubling in a very new way for Noé. It’s his most mature film, an unabashedly and audaciously experimental work.” – Screen Daily