Lux Æterna

Lux Æterna (2020) is an experimental film by Gaspar Noé that you can watch online on iFILM. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Béatrice Dalle play versions of themselves on the set of a film about witches — Dalle directing, Gainsbourg cast as a woman about to be burned at the stake. The runtime is fifty minutes. Noé uses every one of them.

The shoot is falling apart before the first scene rolls. The crew argues, the schedule slips, producers interfere from off-camera, and the actresses wait in costume under increasingly strange lighting. Noé structures the film like a found-footage diary crossed with a film essay — split screen, handheld cameras, quotations from Dreyer and Bresson inserted between scenes. In the final stretch, the lights on set stop obeying anyone.

Noé is less interested in the horror genre than in the set itself as a place where control is always provisional. The film reads as a meditation on what it means to put a woman in front of a camera and call it art — uncomfortably funny in its first half, genuinely disorienting by the end. Note: the final sequence contains extended stroboscopic effects. Stream Lux Æterna (2020) online on iFILM.