Vortex

Vortex (2021) is a French drama directed by Gaspar Noé — watch it online on iFILM. An elderly film critic with a failing heart and his wife, a retired psychiatrist sliding into dementia, share a Paris apartment. For the film's entire 142 minutes the screen stays split down the middle: two cameras, two lives drifting apart in the same rooms.

The split-screen is not a stylistic game. It shows what dementia actually does to shared space: one person's day and another's are no longer the same day. The wife wanders the book-cluttered flat losing track of doors and time; her husband tries to finish a manuscript about dreams and death while quietly watching her disappear. Their son, played by Alex Lutz, arrives to find something he can't fix.

Noé made the film after surviving a cerebral hemorrhage himself. Horror director Dario Argento and actress Françoise Lebrun, both non-professional actors in the conventional sense, carry the whole weight of it. There is no consoling score, no narrative resolution. This is one of the bluntest films about old age and care that exists. Stream Vortex (2021) online on iFILM.