Lux Æterna

The movie’s half-hearted jokes, on frustrated women artists and their blind male collaborators, tend to be one-note and thankfully besides the point. But if you adjust your expectations, you’re more likely to accept Lux Aeterna as a vigorously realized doodle.

While it holds more value for the conversations it will undoubtedly spark between audiences, the thriller still stands as a bold and brash experiment that demands multiple viewings to get the most of its style and themes.

Cinephiles will grin at Noé’s references to Dreyer, Godard, and Ranier Werner Fassbinder, and everyone with functioning eyesight will stare agape at the closing lightshow, but the experience won’t lead to substantive post-movie conversations as Irreversible and Climax did.

If the film-within-the-film is a vapid fetishization of women’s martyrdom, Lux Æterna is a willful exercise in repulsing its own audience.

Lux Aeterna, to its credit, is a pretty terrible commercial and an undeniably fascinating experiment.

It might leave audiences feeling brutalized, exhilarated, amused, annoyed, or all of the above, but will it leave them feeling like they want to drop a thousand dollars on a handbag? They will certainly feel like they’ve just watched a Gaspar Noé film.

Insufficiently diverting ... Lux Æterna shows Noé reverting to the self-parodic silliness that Climax had taken him past.