Gaspar Noé’s Vortex 

When Gaspar Noé’s Vortex premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, reviews suggested that the enfant terrible behind Enter The Void, Seul Contre Tous, Irreversible and Climax had finally matured. The split-screen film stars Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun as a couple living out their last days in a Parisian apartment. It’s a confronting and formally daring portrait of ageing and mortality which Noé made following a life-threatening brain haemorrhage. Yet, it’s not the usual bare-knuckle ride associated with Noé’s provocateur reputation. 

Rewind to a pre-pandemic 2019 Cannes where Noé screened short film Lux Æterna, a provocative visual assault starring Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg as themselves discussing their on-set experiences. At the same time, a new crop of writers and directors determined to push buttons and boundaries in cinema as personal catharsis seemed to be materialising. 

In a nearby theatre on the Croisette that same year, Quentin Tarantino was in the audience for Cannes’ premiere of Nina Wu, a harrowing and bold post-#MeToo portrayal of humiliation, rape and PTSD inspired by the nightmares and experiences of actress Ke-Xi Wu who starred in and co-wrote the film with Taiwanese director Midi Z. On Tarantino attending the screening, Midi Z commented, ‘maybe this film reminds him of his former producer’. Following the outing of producer Harvey Weinstein by the New York Times in October 2017, the depiction of rape in movies by women filmmakers (including Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale and Isabella Eklöf’s Holiday) highlighted patriarchal brutality with long takes forcing the viewer to bear witness to horrific abuses of power. 

Gaspar Noé’s Vortex 

Like Noé’s Irreversible and Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-Moi in the early 2000s, Eklöf’s graphic rape scene in Holiday (a film about Sascha, the trophy girlfriend of a Danish gangster) was designed to challenge audiences. But at the same time, according to the director, the character of Sascha was an amalgamation of co-screenwriter Johanne Algren, star Victoria Carmen Sonne and herself. 

Holiday was released by Anti-Worlds in the UK, a distributor who specialise in ‘unique, provocative and challenging cinema’. On the appeal of current radical filmmakers, Andy Starke, producer and co-owner of Rook Films and Anti-Worlds states, ‘I think so-called “radical” filmmakers are actually personal filmmakers and that’s what appeals to me. These films exist in a totally different world, one where they make sense probably only to the filmmaker. They are mysteries that take time to unfold. Sometimes they provoke, sometimes irritate, sometimes repulse; sometimes they are in danger of falling apart, but that is why they are so exciting and thrilling.’

Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer’s Violation is a hugely personal film that broke new ground as it toyed with the rape/revenge sub-genre, turning it into a stomach-churning experience that rejected the fantasy of vengeance. The film exists in its own hermetically sealed world but speaks to compelling conversations happening online when it comes to rape and abuse of power. Social networking sites have acted as a powerful tool in this regard; however, they’ve also spawned a generation of livestreamers who perform shocking acts for their followers (I dare you to google #Poopalosi) and furthered the reach of conspiracy movements such as QAnon. 

The online battle for humanity is where extreme cinema takes on new life as it considers the impact of rising technology and its IRL implications. Actor and Red Scare podcast co-host Dasha Nekrasova’s debut feature The Scary Of Sixty-First intends to shock with absurd humour in its depiction of paedophilia, sexual urges and the conspiracies surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s death. Similar to Jim Cummings’ The Beta Test, it uses 1970s cinema and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut as a touchstone. In contrast to Nekrasova, Cummings uses a similar concept to examine the digital democratisation of Hollywood in a post-Weinstein era. 

‘Taboos against, say, incest, cannibalism, bestiality remain relatively stable over time,’ notes film critic Anton Bitel. ‘But every age has both its own push-button issues and anxieties and its own technologies; changes in technology are accelerating at a rapid rate. Perhaps all this is best instantiated in enfant terrible Brandon Cronenberg, who very much falls in line with the body-horror tradition inherited from his father David but who also updates these images and ideas to our own online age.’

In Brandon Cronenberg’s brutal techno-horror Possessor, an assassin’s autonomy melts away in a world where commerce and technology are of more value than humanity. Loss or transformation of identity, commodification of self and the distortion of reality in the digital age are fears that dominate in modern extreme cinema. There were reports of people fainting in screenings of Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or winning Titane. It also uses body horror to examine our thorny relationship with technology, bringing the conversation back to deviant sexual appetites while also dismantling social constructs. 

As lockdown demanded our lives moved online more, the crossover between cinema and internet thrived. Public shaming was a running theme throughout Radu Jude’s playfully provocative Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn which opens with a graphic sex tape and uses shocking internet footage in between fictional drama. It took the top prize at Berlin Film Festival for confronting hypocrisy on a manner of subjects including female sexual desire. One of the wildest pieces of cinema released post-lockdown was Janicza Bravo’s Zola which ripped its storyline from a viral 148-tweet thread by a waitress who tagged along with a stripper on a scandalous road trip to Florida. In between all the sex and violence, its themes of deception and cultural appropriation in the social media age are rigorously examined.  

While cinema generally recalibrates what has come before, shifts in technology have motivated a new generation to go to extreme lengths online for monetary gain and approval. Nothing seems to be off limits to certain (largely male) livestreamers which is something Eugene Kotlyarenko’s gonzo satire Spree perfectly portrays. However, there are filmmakers who beautifully, if somewhat disturbingly capture what effect being extremely online has had over the last 20 years. Jane Schoenbrun’s coming-of-age horror We’re All Going To The World’s Fair is a great example of a nuanced film that reflects the danger and succour of internet life. 

Gaspar Noé’s Vortex 

Whatever your opinion on Gaspar Noé’s body of work, his technical nous has always pushed cinematic boundaries and attempted to show the viewer something new. Contemporary provocateurs are using everything at their disposal, with new technology a driving force. Zia Anger’s My First Film screens live online or IRL straight from her MacBook; it’s interactive and changes with every viewing. Though the screen may have shrunk, with many releases watched via streaming services, new kids on the block are boldly reimagining what the moving image means in this online age.

Vortex is in cinemas from Friday 13 May.