‘Vortex’ Review: Gaspar Noé’s Latest True-Life Horror Film Looks Old Age in the Face by Putting It in Your Face
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticRemember how you learned in school about “man’s inhumanity to man”? If the director Gaspar Noé has a theme, it’s “the humanity of inhumanity.” Noé’s shock psychodramas confront subjects like murder, sexual assault, and what happens when a roomful of flex dancers go out of their gourds on LSD.
As a filmmaker, he’s drawn to extremes — to the sensational and the depraved, the sordid and the evil. His quest is to hold that darkness up to the light, to flip the cruelty on its head until we see an echo of ourselves.
Noé takes off from the wide-eyed impulses of an exploitation filmmaker, but he possesses a technical bravura — and a devious sobriety of purpose — that has made him his own genre.
Call it transgressive transcendence. Yet as a Noé watcher from way back, I can’t deny that the only two films of his that I find completely successful on their own terms — that I’ve ever found to be as powerful as they are ambitious — are his first two: the stripped-down, misanthropic Dostoevsky-with-jump-cuts diary film “I Stand Alone” (1998) and the sociopathic criminal head trip “Irreversible” (2002).
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