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The original was posted on /r/movies by /u/LeafBoatCaptain on 2024-09-28 06:17:54+00:00.

Vortex is my first Gaspar Noe film. Presented in split screen, it shows days in the life of an aging couple. The husband (Dario Argento) is an author with a heart condition and the wife (Françoise Lebrun) is a retired doctor suffering from dementia. It’s made me unusually philosophical and melancholy.

Francoise Lebrun’s performance might be the most affecting performance I’ve seen in the last several years. Half the screen is often just her trying to figure out where she is, what she’s doing, and who the people around her are. It’s a mostly silent performance. Her searching eyes tell a whole side story while other things are going on in the other screen.

There are mainly three characters in the film the husband and wife couple and their son. It’s hard to describe how well the writing captures the sense of drifting apart, the sense of being lost in the sea of time as you grow older and your body and brain go out of sync, the horror of your mind and body betraying you.

I wasn’t sure of the split screen format at first but there are sequences where the format shows so clearly how two people are in the same room maybe even talking to each other but one of them is just not there at all. Not in the way that matters. As the film goes on the the split screen format conveys quiet effectively how alone these people are.

The movie is minimalist and slow and, like The Zone of Interest, brings you into a trance and invites you to let your thoughts wander though you can’t really look away. It’s an approach that encourages you to read into the film, to meet it more than halfway. It’s a film about the devastation of old age. It’s also about the isolation of the modern world. Parents and children are apart. Couples and lovers are apart. There’s no community and the elderly are left to fend for themselves. It’s also in a way a sweet love story.

I’ve been thinking of aging lately due to things going on in the extended family and so this was a difficult watch. We are not meant to think of our own mortality, I think. We are not meant to confront the end. It’s like facing some long forgotten primal foe that we thought we left behind in the dark beyond the halo of our campfires. We drape ourselves in the comforting cloak of immortality and youth, thinking it a cloak of invisibility to hide from time but it’s not. We wear no cloak and in the twilight of our lives we will be forced to confront our own nakedness.

I’m so glad I saw this movie even though it made me deeply uncomfortable.