The provocateur has shocked Cannes with a change of pace: an extraordinary midnight movie that follows an elderly couple’s pained last steps in their
Paris apartment
In the final days of the Cannes film festival the guests start leaving, the crowds grow thin and there are empty seats everywhere at the bars, restaurants and cinemas around town. The mood is already funereal ahead of the red carpet premiere of Gaspar Noé’s Vortex – at which point the director slopes in to turn off all the lights.
Prompted by the recent departures of several close
Friends, and his own recent near-death experience (a cerebral haemorrhage in 2019), Noé’s extraordinary film unfolds as a tale of murmured terrors and nameless dread, creeping softly around a cramped Paris apartment like a cinematic Grim Reaper. This is not just a whiplashing change of pace for the tearaway France-based director, who customarily crash-lands on Cannes during its bacchanalian middle weekend. In terms of scope, ambition and execution, it’s one of the finest pictures he’s made.