Vortex 2022

Stéphane Alex Lutz, the couple’s son, lives apart with his own son Kiki and wrestles with a history of drug use. The elderly pair—Charles Morillon as the distinguished author, and Claire Corinne Bruand, a retired psychiatrist who grapples with dementia—remain shut inside a single apartment. As time wears on, age and illness push them farther from each other, and the film quietly mirrors their drifting sense of reality with the screen splitting into two separate planes that echo their overlapping but diverging worlds. The husband is reluctant to disclose details about his wife’s condition and concentrates on finishing another book about cinema and dreams, even as his own frailty deepens.

Stéphane, the son, begs his parents to consider supervised housing with caretakers for Claire, but the husband resents the idea, fearing he will lose the apartment, the books, and the physical reminders of a past life that anchor him to a fading world and his sense of control.

The husband’s condition deteriorates slowly: he suffers a heart attack and collapses. In the morning, Claire finds him on the floor and, at first, does not know what to do, but she calls Stéphane. The husband is taken to the hospital and ultimately dies. After his death, the film’s visual motif shifts—those split screens realign to reflect the changing balance of their lives—while Stéphane becomes visibly emotional and curls up on his mother’s lap. The unwavering tension between care and dependency intensifies, and Stéphane begins to relapse into drug use as Claire, in a bid to cope, starts removing all the medications from the bathroom and tries to flush them away.

The wife dies peacefully in bed, though it is implied she may have died from gas poisoning after turning on the kitchen stove before going to bed. At her funeral, Stéphane recounts the last months of caring for the couple, followed by a slide show of moments from his mother’s life. Looking at the wall of urns where Claire’s ashes are placed, Kiki asks whether his grandparents have a new home now; Stéphane tells him that homes are for the living. In the final shots, the apartment is shown in still images, gradually emptied of the couple’s possessions until it is completely vacant. The closing image features the mourning photos of the husband (1940-2020) and wife (1944-2020) from when they were younger, a quiet testament to a long, shared life.