Dying is one of the only two entirely universal human experiences (the other is being born), which would in principal make it one of the great subjects of art, but I guess it's understandable why it isn't. Death is, after all, depressing. It frequently involves physical suffering. It is something we don't like to think about. So it's not really much of a surprise that the subject seems to attract filmmakers who are prone to assaulting their audience: hence why it feels inevitable that the notorious director Gaspar Noé has now made a film about dying of old age, and better yet, dying while suffering from age-related dementia, Vortex. The last film I can think of that tackled this exact topic (not, I mean, coping with death; not what happens after death; the actual raw fact of dying, being a sack of meat that stops moving and begins rotting) was 2012's Amour by Michael Haneke, one of the only filmmakers of the 21st Century who could plausibly be described as even more cruel to their audience than Noé. So maybe that's just what it takes: to make a great film about the terrifying mystery of death, you have to be a meanspirited S.O.B. whose films are vicious provocations, the kind of thing an audience forces itself to endure rather than just passively watches.

Certainly, Vortex is a film to be endured. But just as certainly, Vortex is a great film, one that treats its subject with none of the glib nastiness that one might be justifiably worried about Noé providing. And I say that from the perspective of a committed fan. This isn't exactly a break from the director's usual modus operandi; it's still aggressive in its use of form and while I think it would be grossly unfair to call it "gimmicky", it wouldn't therefore be inaccurate. But it's muted and restrained where Noé tends towards garish messes; the film relies extensively on plain, naturalistic long takes, often static and sometimes handheld, filmed by Benoît Debie in a washed-out, grainy array of undersaturated earth tones. It's somewhat ugly, in fact, but it's ugliness that matches extremely well with the frankness of the subject matter. Stretch a point just a little bit, and you can even find a thematically resonant justification for it: as age and dementia saps the vitality from the main characters' bodies, so does fading vision and general exhaustion strip away the brightness and color from the world surrounding them.

Those main characters have no names, incidentally: it's just an old married couple, played by first-time actor and legendary horror film director Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun. He's a film critic or filmmaker or something of the sort; Noé's script refuses to give us any context other than what we can pick up in the moment, and all we ever pick up is that the man is trying to finish work on a book project he's apparently been sitting on for ages, about films and perception and dreaming. He's also suffered one or more heart attacks over the years, and moves through the couple's cluttered apartment with glacial slowness. She used to be a psychiatrist, but now she's lost enough of her memories that it's down to random chance if she'll even remember where she is or who the man next to her is at any given point. She's otherwise in decent enough physical shape, but taking care of her still takes virtually all of the stamina her husband has to offer. And so they both have to rely on their son Stéphane (Alex Lutz), who has his own miseries to cope with, fighting addiction and apparently only just succeeding, while having what is very vaguely implied to be a pretty nasty emotional stand-off with his ex, the mother of his son Kiki (Kylian Dheret).

I have mentioned the film's long takes, but not what it does with them. After its prologue - a pleasant rooftop glass of wine between the couple that is the last time in the film that the woman seems fully in control of her faculties - Vortex breaks itself into two separate frames: we first see this as the couple lies in bed, and a thick black line in the exact middle slowly descends from the top of the frame to the bottom, inexorably dividing the pair as they sleep. This black line never goes away: the rest of the movie entirely plays out in split screen, showing what both characters are doing in a given moment. Sometimes they are in entirely different spaces; sometimes we're seeing different angles of one scene; sometimes the two cameras are right next to each other and the frames almost seem to perfectly line up. It's as tightly controlled as the director's earlier films are sprawling, as focused and intimate as they are cosmic.

Noé doesn't go to any kind of aesthetic extremes with this: generally speaking when important events or important dialogue is happening in one half of the film, the other half obligingly quiets down and just putters around. And that's ignoring how little of "importance" happens in Vortex. This is pure slice-of-life stuff, letting the man and woman muck around in their lives, overlooked by the entire world and undervalued as just two old carcasses shuffling to the grave, so there's really not much to do other than drift from one end of their apartment to the other. The closest anything comes to a truly challenging aesthetic is the editing. Nearly every cut (of which there aren't many) includes a few frames of black in-between the actual film clips, providing a disorienting flicker throughout; I don't think it's something as cheaply literal as "we get distracted, just like the woman with dementia does", but it does make the simple act of looking at a movie feel slightly uncomfortable and the mere fact of getting through it a little bit wearisom, and that does seem to put us in the characters' skin a bit.

But back to the split-screen, and to the way it puts both characters in lonely bubbles. The story is about the tragedy lying in wait for anybody who gets old enough: in the end, we all end up alone, trapped in our failing bodies and failing brains, and even the promise of marriage as a form of comfort and companionship into old age is no match for a dementia-ravaged brain that has largely erased that relationship. So we see them (and occasionally their son), locked away in their boxes, and the moments where those boxes overlap and converge are all the sweeter and more satisfying because they are rare. I would almost call it "sentimental" if Vortex had a sentimental bone in its body, but Argento and Lebrun (who are both excellent, for the record, and I have to wonder if we've been robbed of decades of fantastic Argento performances, based on how much nuance he brings to this film's depiction of the man as prickly and in some ways actively terrible, but still so understandable as a human in pain at every moment that it's hard to hold his iniquities against him) aren't playing the characters that way. They're not nostalgic, nor romantic; they're just moving through the present moment stiffly and pragmatically, because as long as you're not dead you still have to do things like clean and eat and look out the window.

The whole film is equally as blunt as those performances. The three leads, and Noé himself, are introduced in the opening credit along with the year of their birth, directly calling attention our attention to the ever-marching fact of age (these years will be later confirmed as the birth years of the characters). It's basically providing a tombstone right when the movie starts.

For the 142 minutes following those dates, Vortex scrapes along at a stubbornly slow crawl, emphasising the fatigue of largely empty days, watching as these characters grow thinner and most ghostlike by the minute, leaving only the apartment itself as something solid. It is full of personality and distinguishing touches; it feels impressively lived-in, the way that a space that has evolved around the same people for decades will feel. If there's any sentiment, it's in the apartment itself, a collection of memories and past selves that holds the story of these two people even as they themselves cannot do so. And it turns out to be the most gut-wrenching provocation of a provocative career that Noé doesn't let us or them have this; the film's final sequence undoes even this little bit of sympathy, coldly and honestly showing us the reality of the world that doesn't mark the passing of old people, refusing us any comfort or easy way outs. There's nothing nice or fair about aging and dying, the film declares flatly, and then simply abandons us to that fact, not even giving us the cool-down of an end credits scroll to cope with it.

And for all that, Vortex isn't actually cruel. It's very good at getting us to empathise with these people, never gawking at them as they wear down, but demanding that we think of ourselves and our loved ones doing the same thing, and in so doing grappling with our shared humanity, our embodiment in meat sacks with a short shelf life, and an even shorter period of being fully functional. For again, this is a universal experience, and the film's main argument seems to be that we simply acknowledge that. It's not redemptive, it's not cathartic, it's not poetic, it's not good in any way. It just is.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.

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