Irreversible
2002 · Directed by Gaspar Noé
Original language: French
- drama
- thriller
- crime
The story
A woman’s lover and her ex-boyfriend take justice into their own hands after she becomes the victim of a rapist. Because some acts can’t be undone. Because man is an animal. Because the desire for vengeance is a natural impulse. Because most crimes remain unpunished.
What it’s like
Long, unbroken takes drift through a Paris night in sickly, pulsing light: strobing red and blue, grimy underpass fluorescents, a nightclub lit like a sinking aquarium. Gaspar Noé's camera is restless and low, swooping and spinning, while a throbbing, subsonic drone and the hiss of a dizzying techno soundtrack press on the chest. The mood is nihilistic dread, a grinding, hallucinatory unease that tips into nausea, and the film is harrowing rather than comforting: it contains a graphic, prolonged rape, brutal violence and bloody head trauma, homicide, drug use, and an extended sequence that is close to unwatchable. Its people are caught in a spiral of revenge and self-destruction, and the story runs backward in time, so the tone grows heavier as events unravel toward their origin. It suits no cozy or background viewing and is aimed at viewers who want an uncompromising, disorienting provocation about violence and time, and who can sit through extreme, deliberately punishing material.
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