Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Vortex’ On Netflix, Where A Cop Uses A VR Anomaly To Try To Save His Long-Dead First Wife

We love “butterfly effect” stories, where people go back in time, make a change to something in the past, and end up profoundly affecting their present. It could be on purpose, but it’s actually more interesting when the changes in the present are unanticipated. The ur-example of this second phenomenon is Back To The Future, but with new technology, screenwriters don’t need to dig up a DeLorean to make changes to the space-time continuum.

VORTEX: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A darkened bedroom. “July 19, 1998.”

The Gist: Ludovic Béguin (Tomer Sisley) is sleeping, but his wife Mélanie (Camille Claris) is wide awake; she wants to make sure their infant daughter Juliette is still breathing. Once she confirms that, she goes out for an early morning run. A couple of hours later, Ludo wakes up, and checks in on Juliette as someone urgently knocks on the door; it’s Nathan Leroy (Éric Pucheu), his friend and police colleague. They found Mélanie’s body on the beach, apparently after she accidentally fell off a cliff.

“July 7, 2025.” Twenty-seven years later, Ludo and Nathan are on the same beach, where a woman’s body has been found. Nathan knows that this dregs up bad memories for Ludo, but he insists on pushing through it. The most annoying thing is the drones that fly overhead, taking readings and video of the area in order to create a virtual reality environment for the investigators.

Ludo is eager to see the VR rendering in order to investigate further, so he impatiently waits while, Agathe (Juliette Plumecocq-Mech), the grumpy detective who runs the program downloads the renderings. When he puts on the glasses and walks into the VR room, he surveys the scene, and is able to see some evidence that was washed away by the surf. He also sees Mélanie jogging on the beach, and she turns when he calls to her. He asks Agathe if that could be a glitch in the VR, but she says it isn’t, but he may be hallucinating due to lack of sleep.

Mélanie’s death has always haunted him, and even though he has a life with his now-adult daughter Juliette (Anaïs Parello), second wife Parvana (Zineb Triki) and preteen son Sam (Maxime Guenguen), his encounter with Mel in the VR room has him curious. He goes back around midnight, walks the beach, and encounters Mel sitting on a rock. She doesn’t recognize him, mainly because he’s now in his 50s. To her, it is also around midnight. He gives her some clues that he’s indeed the Ludo she knows, including where he hides his cigarettes; he only quit after she died. She manages to find them, surprising twentysomething Ludo in the process.

When she comes back, she asks Ludo how she died, and is shocked to realize that it’s going to happen in 11 days. Ludo tells her to get a ticket and leave town, which may change her fate. In order to test that he can change the present, he tells her not to go with his younger self to watch the World Cup semifinal at a friend’s house, and he’ll see if a picture he has from the night has changed.

In the meantime, Ludo is battling the DA, Nicolas Orsat (Julien Floreancig), who wants to rule the woman’s death a suicide. Both he and Nathan think that’s not what happened, especially given the victim’s mode of dress and other circumstantial evidence. Ludo also distracts Agathe by taking a tin from her precious tea collection, in order to get to Mel’s file, which Agathe was due to digitize.

When Ludo is proven right that 2025 is changing due to his VR interactions with Mel, he tells her to get that train ticket. But the resulting change in the present is completely unexpected, especially after he sees that she still has a file, only with a date that’s now two days earlier.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Cross the time-traversing elements of a movie like The Lake House with something more akin to Sliders.

Our Take: The story that drives Vortex is patently ridiculous, to be sure. Creators Camille Couasse and Sarah Farkas have layered this highly implausible “VR glitch” story on top of what’s a pretty standard murder plot. There are also “butterfly effect” time travel implications that are going to be in play. It should all be just silly to watch. But for the most part, it works.

Let’s get the ridiculousness out of the way first. The technology presented in the 2025 story is highly implausible given that it’s only two years from now; near-future sci-fi needs to be at least a plausible version of what that near future would be like, given what we know what technology is like now. The VR that is presented here won’t exist in 2025, which takes us out of the story a bit.

Another absurdity is how various characters are either aged up or down. Younger actors, like Simone Peinado-Barré, who plays Mel’s friend Florence in 1998, is given glasses and pinned-back hair to show her in 2025 as Nathan’s wife. Other younger actors are given some slight amounts of grey hair or makeup crow’s feet. On the other hand, there’s no way that Sisley, who’s been a familiar actor on both sides of the Atlantic for two decades, looks like he’s in his mid-twenties in his 1998 scenes.

There are also lots of extra characters introduced, like Juliette’s on-again-off-again girlfriend Noémie (Yuna Le Boulicot), who feel extraneous, and are obviously fodder for the “butterfly effect” of Ludo and Mel’s interaction in the VR room. There are also other obvious references, like Ludo specifically wishing Nathan a “happy 27th anniversary”, that drives home the fact that they met right around the time Mel died. Their marriage and kids, as well as Ludo’s new wife and young son Sam, will likely disappear due to these machinations, and it’s pretty obvious from all of these references.

But the show works despite all of this silliness. It’s got a light undertone that a show like this almost never has, where characters like Agathe, with her snarkiness and neatly-arranged tea tins, can exist and have their quirks be part of the story. Ludo himself isn’t all doom and gloom despite Mel’s death; it’s a hole in his heart, for sure, but he’s successfully rebuilt his life and done a fine job raising Juliette, and that is all put in jeopardy by him and Mel trying to manipulate the inevitable.

There is some really good chemistry between Sisley and Claris, and it’ll be interesting to see if she gets closer to the 2025 version of Ludo while pulling away from the 1998 version, and how that might affect Ludo’s memories of her.

As usual, there are lots of time-space-continuum implications that can be investigated but won’t be, if only because it would make things too complicated. It’ll always leave the viewer with questions. But we hope just enough changes in 2025 to make Ludo and Mel’s VR interactions have real consequences.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: In the VR, 2025 Ludo tells Mel that she was murdered, based on the new crime scene photos in her changed file.

Sleeper Star: Léo Chalié plays Kim, a detective colleague of Nathan and Ludo, who also seems like a superfluous character at first, but how will her role change as Ludo and Mel change the past?

Most Pilot-y Line: When Ludo and Mel figure out the photo gambit, Mel mentions the obvious place where he got the idea, “I’ll disappear from the picture? Like from Back To The Future.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Vortex is silly at times, implausible at others. But by the end of the first episode, you’ll still be hooked, even if it’s just to see what kind of changes the characters inadvertently make in 2025 when they change events in 1998.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.