It's good for us,” the old woman says to her husband on the balcony.

She provided crackers and wine.

The couple toasts each other with small crystal glasses above the lead-grey roofs of Paris.

The spring breeze carries what might be mistaken for hope, but it is the breeze before the storm in whose eddies all will perish.

It is not without reason that “Vortex”, the new film by Argentinian-French director Gaspar Noé, has this whirlwind title in its title.

Noé prefaced the drama with the sentence: "For all whose brains will decompose before their hearts".

The quiet balcony minutes at the beginning are followed by more than two hours in which dementia and physical deterioration afflict two lives, slowly wiping them out.

Maria Wiesner

Editor in the society department at FAZ.NET.

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We see the man (horror director Dario Argento in his first leading role) and the woman (Françoise Lebrun) lying next to each other in bed in the morning.

Then the picture splits to split screen.

From now on, one half belongs to him and one half to hers.

While she shuffles through the apartment and begins the morning toilet, he lies in bed for a few more minutes, listening to the radio.

The small routines show that more than ten years of married life were spent together here.

The woman puts the espresso machine on the stove, the man will switch it off shortly afterwards and pour himself a cup.

It becomes clear that everyday life has gotten out of joint when the woman puts on a dress and leaves the apartment.

She leaves the door open.

Already in the hallway her eyes grope for the way.

On the street, she wanders into a hardware store and gets lost in the crowded aisles.

The camera follows her close to her body, deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of goods, she begins to pick things up and put them down again, looking around helplessly.

The horror creeps into everyday life and grabs the audience, because Françoise Lebrun seems like a lost child who has lost all footing in the world.

While she keeps getting lost, Argento types thoughts on the cinema and dreams on a typewriter.

How long can it be before he misses her?

Ten pages of script were enough

Noé is known for visual and narrative experiments that challenge audiences.

When he told about the consequences of a rape in "Irreversible" in 2002, he reversed the plot and began the brutal revenge (at the premiere in Cannes, some left the hall).

In the horror trip “Climax” (2018), the camera flies in endlessly long, dizzying shots over raving dancers intoxicated with LSD.

And in “Lux Aeterna” (2019), neon strobe flashes cause nausea when witches are burned.

The theme of the film dominates the choice of artistic means for him, and so it is not surprising that he is very reserved in the dementia drama "Vortex", adapting the narrative pace to the elderly people it is about.

Noé trusts his main actors so much