For Fans of Gaspar Noe

Irreversible is the film that announced Noe as a major artist rather than a provocateur. Told in reverse chronological order, it strips away the safety net of narrative distance and forces the viewer to sit with consequence before cause, grief before event. The Monica Bellucci assault sequence is one of the most discussed scenes in contemporary cinema not because it is gratuitous but because Noe refuses the standard grammar of elision that lets audiences off the hook. What follows, in reverse, is a love story of heartbreaking sweetness. The contrast is the whole argument.

Noe made Climax in fifteen days with a cast of real dancers and almost no script, and the result is the most viscerally effective piece of filmmaking about group psychology since Lord of the Flies. The first half is one of the great dance films ever made: the opening audition reel alone is worth the ticket. Then the spiked sangria arrives, and the film becomes something closer to an endurance test in the best possible sense. Noe uses the camera as a delirious participant, rotating, inverting, and dragging through corridors while the dancers unravel around it. It is a film that knows exactly what it is doing and dares you to look away.

Shot on two cameras simultaneously running in separate rooms of the same flat, Vortex uses a genuine split-screen to track an elderly couple as dementia and heart disease slowly take them apart. Noe cast real-life horror director Dario Argento and 86-year-old Francoise Lebrun, and neither gives a performance so much as an inhabited existence. The film is the obverse of everything Noe is known for: quiet, patient, devastating. It argues that the most violent thing that can happen to a person is the ordinary passage of time, and it makes the case without a single shock cut or strobe.