[FILM]

Life’s far from a bed of roses for Françoise Lebrun and Dario Argento’s ailing, elderly couple.

Alamy

★★★

OUT 13 MAY CERT TBC / 140 MINS

DIRECTOR Gaspar Noé

CAST Dario Argento, Françoise Lebrun, Alex Lutz

PLOT An elderly husband (Argento) and wife (Lebrun) face their mortality as severe illnesses threaten their quiet Parisian existence. Helped by their recovering drug-addict son (Lutz), the pair drift through their difficult final days as they succumb to fragility and failing health.

VIEWERS FAMILIAR WITH the work of director Gaspar Noé, established enfant terrible and proponent of the transgressive New French Extreme style of filmmaking, may find his latest film a surprising left-turn. Ostensibly a drama about a family affected by dementia, the film explores the punishing effects of the condition and the emotional consequences of facing the mortality of a loved one. But while Vortex steers away from much of the shocking violence of Noé’s previous films, it still retains a particular kind of cold horror that burrows deep and takes hold.

An unnamed husband and wife, played by Italian genre filmmaker Dario Argento and prolific French actor Françoise Lebrun, are the focal point of Vortex. She has dementia, while he has a severe heart condition, and, despite their attempts to maintain a sense of agency and personality, their older lives have become entirely defined by these illnesses. Shuffling from room to room in their cluttered Paris apartment, a harbinger of all the lives they have managed to live, the pair go about their days separately, mostly silently, yet always connected in the way that couples who have been together for decades simply are. This is reflected in Noé’s formal choices in the film too, most clearly in his decision to split the screen in two for the majority of the runtime. A black line slithers down the middle of the screen like an ominous slime and husband and wife are presented alongside one another in individual frames, tethered yet caught in a divide.