VORTEX Put Dario Argento and Gaspar Noé together and you assume you’re in for something demonic. Argento is the revered maestro of the Italian giallo horror cycle, the director of febrile chillers like 1977’s Suspiria; Noé (Irreversible, Enter The Void) is the linchpin of France’s ‘extreme cinema’, a tireless explorer of film as Bad Trip. Especially with a title like Vortex, you can expect to be in for a bad time, and that is indeed the case. Yet Vortex is not at all the Noé film you expect. It’s a mature departure from him, his simplest, realest film yet: a portrait of an elderly couple (played by Argento and veteran French actress Françoise Lebrun) whose lives unravel as dementia starts to affect the wife. That’s lives, rather than “life”, because their existence together begins to follow two parallel but separate tracks – something Noé depicts through the simple but disturbing device of having a black line drip down the screen, dividing it in two, as the pair become increasingly and irrevocably estranged.
There is absolutely no reassurance here; the film’s one light, albeit ominous, moment is a prefatory clip of Françoise Hardy singing “My Friend The Rose”, a ballad about transience and mortality. It sets the tone for a bleak but riveting film and one that’s acted magnificently – both leads exploring different levels of vulnerability and physical decline. It’s a deeply sobering film and not one that obviously offers much hope, yet it shows how Noé’s taste for formal experiment can connect – to surprisingly moving effect – with a recognisable human factor.