A splintered gaze is this film's genesis. Not a stylistic affectation, not a gimmick to be flaunted like some postmodern fetish, but the ontological foundation of a work that chooses to gaze into the abyss not head-on, but through the shattered prism of two consciousnesses adrift. Gaspar Noé, our resident enfant terrible, the officiant of cinematic rites performed in neon and strobe, lays down the weapons of explicit provocation to take up the far sharper and crueler ones of phenomenology. "Vortex" is a diptych in motion, an incessant visual counterpoint that depicts the ultimate solitude: the kind that is spent just inches away from another life, within the same bed, between the same walls that once defined a shared space and now enclose two parallel, inexorably divergent universes.

The split-screen here is not the Polyvision attempted by Abel Gance in his Napoléon, nor the adrenalized device of a Brian De Palma. It is something closer to an experiment in quantum physics applied to human drama: two particles, once entangled in a single system (the couple, love, a life of intellect and passion), which now, upon observation, reveal their irreducibly singular nature. On one side of the screen, He (Dario Argento), a film critic desperately trying to cling to the order of the written word, to the logic of an essay on cinema and dreams, as the world around him crumbles. On the other, She (Françoise Lebrun), a former psychiatrist whose mind, once an instrument for analyzing the psyches of others, has become a labyrinth with no exit, a tangle of frayed memories and aphasic impulses. The two cameras, often independent, follow their limping paths inside the Parisian apartment that serves as a synecdoche for their existence: an overflowing archive of books, posters, and films, a mausoleum to a culture that proves impotent in the face of biological collapse.

The casting is a stroke of meta-textual genius that elevates "Vortex" from a chronicle of decline to a terminal reflection on the memory of cinema itself. To have Dario Argento, the demiurge of baroque murder, the choreographer of aestheticized death, in the role of a fragile man facing the most banal of ends, one stripped of all formalism, is an act of sublime cruelty. Argento, who built a career on the killing of young bodies, is here an aging body being extinguished, whose greatest anguish is not a razor glinting in the dark, but a misplaced prescription or a leaking faucet. The walls of his study, plastered with posters for Vampyr and Nosferatu, are not mere set dressing but ghosts of a potent imaginary, now reduced to wallpaper in an existential cell. The master of artificial horror is swallowed by natural horror, with no escape and no Goblin score to mark its rhythm.

And then there is Françoise Lebrun. Anyone who holds Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore in their personal pantheon cannot help but feel a cold shiver down their spine. The Veronika of that film was a torrent of words, an incarnation of the post-Nouvelle Vague's existential logorrhea, capable of dissecting love and desire in torrential monologues. The woman Lebrun plays in "Vortex" is her spectral negative. The word has been taken from her, language has imploded, leaving only broken gestures, lost gazes, an aimless wandering among objects that have lost their names and their function. It is the tragedy of a dissolving intellect, a terrible contrapasso that closes a circle spanning fifty years of French cinema history. Noé doesn't merely direct two actors; he orchestrates two icons, two cultural phantoms, having them perform their own mortality. Their largely improvised performance achieves a degree of verisimilitude that transcends acting to become a form of testimony.

The apartment itself is the third protagonist, a living organism that slowly suffocates its inhabitants. A stratified accumulation of culture that becomes pure clutter, a physical extension of His mind, which tries to maintain order, and of Her mind, which has surrendered to chaos. Every book, every DVD, every note is a handhold onto an identity that is crumbling. In this, "Vortex" engages in a long-distance dialogue with the literature of decay, almost a cinematic and claustrophobic version of Georges Perec's Things, but at the end of their life cycle, when things no longer define a status but instead bury their owners. Noé's camera, traditionally acrobatic and invasive, is here more patient, more observational, but no less merciless. His long takes are no longer the psychedelic journeys of Enter the Void, but stakeouts in stagnant time, chronicles of a hopeless vigil.

The film, in its grueling length and its refusal of any consoling catharsis, becomes a physical experience for the viewer. The split-screen device forces us to make a continuous choice: who to watch? His attempt to write or Her bewilderment in the kitchen? The conversation of their son (Alex Lutz), a tragic and powerless figure who represents the outside world and its inadequacy, with one parent, while the other performs a crucial action off-screen, but in the same narrative moment? This division of attention is not a game but a simulation of helplessness, a way of making us feel the irreparable fracture between these two solitudes. The audio, often overlapping and confused, contributes to this sense of disorientation, forcing us to experience the collapse of communication sensorially.

Noé, who has always ended his films with his famous motto "Le temps détruit tout" (Time destroys all things), had never given a demonstration of it so literal, so devoid of aestheticizing filters. If in Irréversible the destruction was a violent and instantaneous act, here it is a slow process, an unstoppable corrosion, entropy applied to existence. There is no villain to blame, no trauma to exorcise. There is only the biological process in its barest form. In this, "Vortex" is perhaps the ultimate horror film, because the monster is not external but is time itself, the inexorable mechanism of which we are all a part.

Noé's work, in the end, is not a film about old age or dementia in a sociological or medical sense. It is a cinematic treatise on the end of individual consciousness. An art installation that uses cinema to show the final stage of separation, the one that precedes the final dissolution. And when, after more than two hours, the black barrier dividing the screen slowly begins to expand, swallowing first one image and then the other, we are not watching the end of a film, but the purest visual representation of oblivion. The two parallel universes, which struggled to coexist for the entire running time, are finally unified by darkness. The vortex has completed its course. The silence that follows is not the end of the screening, but the echo of its devastating truth. A terminal masterpiece, necessary and unbearable.