Critics reviews

Is Noé suddenly feeling self-reflective? Not to be contrarian for the sake of it, but I struggle to find anything gentle or humanistic in Vortex. That’s what’s so mesmerising about it. It is the ringing of the death knell, a memento mori in action, and an alienating if ultimately deeply humbling experience for its audience.

The acting is tremendous and the improvised script tantalising. Best of all is the impact of the split screen. As your eyes dart between the two characters, you realise the technique would work for the story of any intimates torn apart by a perception-warping disease.

[S]omehow, without a single shot of excess or indecency, this might be his most disturbing movie yet... It doesn’t, obviously, end well, but there is overwhelming artistic intensity here.

Gaspar Noé brings his cauterisingly fierce gaze to the spectacle of old age: the world of those about to enter the void. He brings to it a particular structural insight which I don’t think I have ever seen represented so clearly.

It’s an oddly compelling, if at times uncomfortably voyeuristic, viewing experience – like staring at a photograph of two strangers whose faces are fading away.

Noé has delivered a moving essay on a subject that many would prefer to shun. It’s haunting, involving and quietly devastating. It may be unlike anything the director has done previously but if you look close enough the similarities are there.

It’s tempting to call the semi-autobiographical film — inspired by both the death of Noé’s mother and his own recovery from a brain hemorrhage (and subsequent sobriety) — Noé’s most personal movie. But what makes “Vortex” stand out is its cruel universality.

Noé’s impulse to show his soft side frequently heralds even more punishment afterward—for the characters, and by extension, the audience. If he shows you the beginning of a stroke, it’s safe to assume he’s never going to cut away, so whether or not you want to, you’ll see that event through to the end—and maybe beyond.

In a sense, it’s no surprise that this hammeringly realistic chronicle is his most nightmarish film. As it happens, it’s also his most compassionate.

Vortex doesn’t need crushed heads to be emotionally pulverizing. There’s an unflinching, near-clinical relentlessness to the picture, but therein lies its compassion and empathy. Noé’s protagonists don’t get a reprieve from their situation, so why should we?

And while there is no shortage of overly saccharine and optimistic modern films out there right now, the utter undaunted misery of Vortex amounts to needless cruelty. The unpleasant nihilism of the film offers no catharsis.

[I]n the end, both of these actors become pawns in Noé’s excessively clever game. So much of Vortex is stirring, compelling, upsetting. But a greater share is merely numbing in its depressive showiness. Noé, the eternal provocateur, is the leopard who can’t or won’t change his spots.