The maverick director spares his audience none of the harrowing hopelessness facing an ageing couple in this small-scale but intense study.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 17, 2025

A haunting rumination on old age and death, but lacks the narrative and emotional consistency needed to make it fully engaging.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 18, 2024

It is sincere, and I think the split screen works a lot better than I thought.

| Feb 7, 2024

This is Gaspar Noé at his most approachable and simultaneously disconsolate.

| Original Score: B+ | Jul 21, 2023

Noé focuses on the end stages of life and how ageing, as well as illnesses like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, can turn us into haunted houses, ghosts of ourselves and our lives trapped within the still-living vessel of our flesh and blood.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 24, 2023

The opening song talks about the ephemerality of life and from there, a story that is as suffocating as it is Lynchian is born. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 8/10 | Oct 17, 2022

Noé has shocked us with a film so personal and different from what he's previously offered. [Full review in Spanish]

| Sep 13, 2022

At times Vortex finds harmony by combining identical shots from different angles; Other times, it soaks up the home tension by contrasting the movement on the left side with the static right side. And vice versa.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 2, 2022

For all its compassion, though, it’s still a gruelling work in its account of old age’s terrors.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 24, 2022

Noé is best when he’s leaning into the edge-lord cinema that he’s known for, but he is clearly thinking deeper and more personally with this movie.

| Aug 13, 2022

The absolute lack of compassion towards the characters is the kind of affront that jeopardizes what is probably Gaspar Noé's best film. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jul 29, 2022

The last feature of Noe it is nothing that Noe did before. [Film review in Spanish]

| Jul 29, 2022

With Vortex, [Noé] is once again pessimistic (though there are some who may call him a realist), but he does without the cynicism that defines his filmography. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 28, 2022

Perhaps the most tender and calm film within a filmography dedicated to moral shock wrapped in visual shrillness. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 27, 2022

“Vortex” is an elegant piece of filmmaking on a difficult subject – old age.

| Original Score: A- | Jul 21, 2022

While dealing with the gloomy aspect of the subject, this demanding, depressing, and moving film shows an atrocious lucidity.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 19, 2022

A meaningful engagement with elder care, dementia and mortality, born of the director’s own experiences with his mother and his near-fatal brain haemorrhage.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 16, 2022

Almost ten years after another cinematic provocateur, Michael Haneke, made a film about an elderly couple with a single child facing mortality (“Amour”), along comes writer/director Gaspar Noé with his take and it is far and away the superior film.

| Original Score: A- | Jul 14, 2022

Noé reminds us that, no matter how exasperating his style may be at times, there's a real artist at work here whose vision helps to bring the challenging subject matter of "Vortex" to rich, vibrant life.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 16, 2022

Vortex is a conundrum: so wrenching it feels hard to ask an audience to give it their time, so honest it demands they do.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 10, 2022