Vortex is being praised as Gaspar Noé’s most humanist film to date. At first glance, that seems to say more about his other movies than this one. Vortex doesn’t have anything as agonizing as Irréversible’s infamous, 10-minute rape scene — very few movies do — and while Noé once again shows off some camera trickery, he’s not using it to assault the senses as he did in Enter the Void. But Vortex is, in its own way, just as harrowing a watch as either of those movies: instead of hideous violence or lurid imagery, it stares unblinkingly at the horrors of old age and the inevitability of death. Irréversible ended (or began - it’s complicated) with the words “time destroys everything,” and Vortex demonstrates just what that means. The fate of the elderly couple at the film’s center will eventually befall us all: the destruction of the mind, the body, and the self. Vortex presents a dungeon’s worth of torture devices and promises that, one day, they will be used on you.

And yet, despite its bleakness, Vortex really is a humanist film. It’s certainly the most grounded, empathetic effort from the former enfant terrible of French cinema. (Fun fact: every article about Gaspar Noé is required by law to feature the phrase “enfant terrible.”) Noé usually achieves an emotional response through sheer visceral brutality, with images so intense and upsetting that the viewer doesn’t need context to be disturbed. The characters in films like Irréversible or Enter the Void are mostly archetypal, and observed without pity. Climax was the first film where Noé seemed to have a shred of affection for his characters, but that doesn’t do the dance troupe at its center any good; when the LSD-spiked sangria hits the fan, Noé tracks the violent consequences with the stylish verve of a music video auteur. In his films, cruel fate is turned into show-stopping spectacle.

Vortex

But things work differently in Vortex. The big conceit, comparable to Irréversible’s backwards narrative or Climax’s dazzling dance sequences, is the split screen that separates the two main characters. It crawls down the screen between them while they sleep, and for the rest of the film one camera is trained on Father (Dario Argento) and the other on Mother (Françoise Lebrun).

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Noé’s stylistic flourishes can feel gimmicky in his lesser work (such as Love, with its unsimulated sex scenes that may as well have just been simulated), but Vortex’s split screen draws us into the existence of these two people as they gradually become disconnected from each other and the world around them. And while Mother and Father are rather thinly sketched (their occupations, as well as the personal items that clutter their apartment, help color them in a tad), they’re brought to life with sensitivity and grace, and for once Noé treats them with compassion. While he doesn’t flinch from the horrors of dementia and death, it feels more like posterity than voyeurism. And because a filmmaker as merciless as Noé cares, the audience cares, too.

Vortex-Gaspar Noe

It’s reminiscent of another movie about old age and mortality by an infamous provocateur: Amour, Michael Haneke’s Oscar-winning magnum opus. Like Noé, Haneke had a well-established reputation for cinematic cruelty going into Amour, although their styles couldn’t be more different. Haneke rejects the stylistic flourishes that Noé uses in his films, instead presenting ugly material as coldly and directly as possible. The violence in Funny Games or Benny’s Video is the kind that horror movies have been using for decades to give the audience a cheap thrill, but anything that could conceivably be “fun” or “exciting” about it has been stripped away, leaving only the queasy aftertaste. His best films, such as The White Ribbon, are sharp, uncompromising works by a master craftsman of great moral clarity; his worst films, such as Funny Games and its shot-for-shot English remake, do little to counter the popular image of Haneke as a contemptuous scold.

But although some have doubted whether Haneke has a heart, Amour is the only evidence anyone needs. This is not to say that it’s too sentimental, of course: it deals frankly with the pain and indignity of old age, and Haneke’s direction is as chilly and severe as ever. Still, no relationship in a Haneke movie is more moving than the marriage between Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva). They carry themselves with love and dignity at the beginning, sitting next to each other at a piano recital; when Anne has a stroke, Georges does everything he can to care for her, even though no one would begrudge him for finding a good nursing home; when she’s so far gone that she can’t even move or speak, he does the kindest thing he could possibly do. In a filmography filled with stomach-turning cruelty, Amour is a movie of quiet, unsentimental grace.

Amour
Image via Sony Pictures Classics

This is not the first article to compare Vortex and Amour, but their similarities run deeper than their plots and their respective provocative directors. Both films are deeply, crushingly sad, and both films force the audience to stare into the face of death no matter how badly they might want to look away. But both of them also have a subtle tenderness that can only be appreciated within the context of their directors’ other films. When Mother and Father eventually die, and when Georges eventually smothers Anne with a pillow, it hurts, but it doesn’t feel meaningless. Noé and Haneke show respect to these two elderly couples by treating their pain with the gravity it deserves, elevating the love between these characters by exploring what it really means to be together to the end.