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Rory Kiberd Shane O’Reilly David Turpin ILLUSTRAT
ION Gavin O’Brien gavinobrien.ie Vortex Director: Gaspar Noé Talent: Dario Argento, Françoise Lebrun, Alex Lutz Release Date: May 13 Gaspar Noé’s latest challenge to the constitution of cinemagoers features Françoise Lebrun and Dario Argento as an unnamed elderly couple facing the ravages of old age – dementia and heart deterioration, respectively – defended only by their faltering grasp on the will to live. That this makes for ‘difficult viewing’ should come as no surprise. Notionally similar subject matter has been broached in Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) and Florian Zeller’s The Father (2020) – the former with icy poise, the latter with a studied theatricality. Noé’s approach, naturally, is more confrontational: from early in the action, the screen is split, everything filmed with two cameras whose footage is played simultaneously in adjacent panels. The effect is disorientating, frustrating, and – not least when the images almost but never quite join – agonising. This is, of course, the entire point. Noé has always used ‘devices’ – the inverted narrative of Irreversible (2002), the ‘disembodied camera’ of Enter the Void (2009), garish 3D in Love (2015) – and one of the reasons his work is unmissable, however bludgeoning it may be, is the iron grip with which he can sustain a formal strategy (or a gimmick, if one was to be more circumspect). Vortex delivers on that front, but it’s also worth seeing for a good deal more. Those who gratefully savoured the crumbs of tenderness and humanity amid the bonfire of 2018’s exhilarating Climax will find much more here, and – despite the seemingly affectless performances from Lebrun and Argento – there is a dramatic heft with which Noé hasn’t always concerned himself. As unsparing as it is to watch, this is a forgiving film, sympathetic not only to the plight of the couple but also to their choices – insofar as those choices are theirs to make – and to those of their troubled adult son (Alex Lutz). Dedicated to ‘those whose minds will decompose before their hearts’ Vortex is loving in a way that feels epiphanic – both in the face of the void and at this stage in the Noé filmography. Simultaneously his most humane film and his most harrowing, it is an uncompromised confrontation with what awaits us all. DT The Innocents Director: Eskil Vogt Talent: Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Rakel Lenora Fløttum Release date: May 20 Rakel Lenora Fløttum – daughter of Ellen Dorrit Petersen both onscreen and in real life – plays a troubled child yearning for a share of the attention lauded on her severely autistic older sister Anna. After the family move to a new home, disgruntled Ida befriends two of the local children, Ben and Aisha. These new friends have the uncanny ability to form a psychic bond, with Anna as a conduit. But amongst them is a force of malevolence, and the sides of good and evil are drawn quickly between the three psychically linked children. But where does Ida stand in all this? Does she too possess abilities? Norwegian director Vogt, who has a long-standing writing partnership with director Joachim Trier, has followed his eerie 2014 debut Blind with this taut, deeply unsettling film that juggles elements of both X-Men and Let The Right One In. It’s a brilliantly evocative film with the constant threat of harm lurking in the shadows of the oppressive apartment complex and the hidden realm of the local forest, the adult world kept at bay as the children’s predicament plays out like an urban Lord of the Flies. The Innocents is an easy film to get swept up in, due in large part to its mightily impressive young cast. And though it feels like we’ve touched on this topic before with the likes of Firestarter, Akira, The Shining, Stranger Things, Midnight Special, etc, Vogt tends to swerve when things get too familiar. A very impressive film for a multitude of reasons, and like it or not, expect a far more sanitised American remake in the near future. SOR