User reviews

There aren't many films that make you feel uncomfortable, ill at ease and as uneasy as this one does, and there aren't many film directors who can achieve that result. Gaspar Noé however, has made a career out of presenting the reality we don't want to see, and with Irreversible he leaves you under no illusion of the torment, torture, distress and agony that can be inflicted on one person by another, with the resulting effects creating monsters out of otherwise rational and reasonable individuals. The acting and performances are outstanding, the editing and cinematography as disorientating as the events of the night dictate, and are sublime. The lines we walk between contentment and chaos exposed with shock and awe, leaves you thinking about your own existence and what might be around the next corner, with little or nothing you can do to prevent it.

A lot has been said about this movie. Yes, there are a couple of brutal and violent scenes. It's even hard to watch at times, but Irreversible is much more than that.

I personally think that the acting is great. There's a natural chemistry between the 3 main characters. Monica Bellucci does a wonderful job as Alex. I give her a lot credit for being involved in such difficult role.

I really like the way the story was told. Some people say that it's a rip off of Memento, and that it doesn't work well in this movie, but I have to disagree. The movie "starts" in a dark way, with a lot of graphic images and violence. But at the end there's this kind of peace, a little dose of happiness..."the calm before the storm". It works really well, and that's what make this a really sad story.

I really recommend this film. But like I said before, it can be hard to watch. Just watch it with an open mind and give it a try.

I'm a sucker for film-world hype--always have been, and probably always will be. When I stumble across a film that is so controversial it inspires both gasps of horror and cheers of praise, I flock to it. There is something intriguing about film's capacity to house unpleasantness, and just how far a director will go in conveying his message (it's always interesting to see whether or not they have a justified reason for the excess). "Irreversible," the backward-structured film from French shock auteur Gaspar Noe ("I Stand Alone") spins you out of control with as much regularity as his camera and characters will allow. It's a curious piece of work designed to provoke the audience--at the beginning, you're disoriented and confused (and, if you're like me, getting carsick from the deliberately erratic camera movements), and even repulsed by the actions of the unfamiliar characters hassling the patrons of a seedy homosexual club, a sequence that ends with a ghastly murder. Okay, then, so what? Clearly the rest of the movie is going to give us an explanation...but would the film have had a similar effect if it were told in a straightforward manner? Is the backward motion of "Irreversible" just a gimmick used by Noe (who is not immune from snobbery and pretension) to draw attention to his film? It's hard to say. Personally, I reject the notion of the reverse storyline being used as a gimmick, simply because of how deliberately the previous pieces fit (certain passages of dialog, particularly a discussion of orgasms that serves as a prelude to one of the most horrifying rape scenes in film history); Noe certainly wasn't asleep in his construction of the film. "Irreversible" displays the type of oppressive misanthropy (the dialog is loaded with racial and homophobic slurs) evidenced in Noe's "I Stand Alone" (the tale of an out-of-work butcher driven to madness by everyone around him), but then pulls back from the hard-edged violence to show a tender humanity that might be even more startling, since the film could have easily played itself for nothing but shock value the entire time. "Irreversible" is an unsettling conundrum that guides us through the highs and lows of the human condition--it pushes buttons of morality, shows in graphic detail what others would only suggest, and brings us out the end of the tunnel exhausted, invigorated, and breathless. A stunning film, somewhat hampered by its excessive dialog.

Holy Macaroni! Believe the hype, folks...this really IS one of the most shocking, confronting and raw movies ever made! It actually is one of those rare purchases that makes you wonder what the role of cinema is in modern society. Irréversible certainly can't be classified as 'entertainment', that's for sure. It merely looks like a brutal eye-opener, highly unpleasant to watch at times and it sometimes makes you even feel ashamed to be human! Some of the stuff here goes beyond your most feared nightmares and could easily provoke depression, anti-social behavior and anxiety among influential viewers. It's real-life drama and that makes it so powerful and shocking. Irréversible is told backwards, 'Memento'-style if you wish...only it's a lot more effective here as it was in Memento, which actually was a pretty boring and extremely overrated movie. This very simple backwards-structure aspect gives Irréversible the opportunity to implement a couple of unique and rarely seen style elements. The first half hour (which actually is the end of the story) smacks you in the face right away sets the tone for a non-stop, raw experience. Also, you don't really get to know the characters until the last chapter (which is actually the beginning of the film) The characters are a riddle to you constantly and you can't symphatise with any of them, since you just know too little. Through wild camera movements and simplistic techno-music, a claustrophobic and horrifying atmosphere gets created and the violence is really hard to digest. The infamous scene in which Monica Belluci brutally gets raped is one of the most perverted things I've ever seen. It seems to go on forever and you can really visiualise the painful hell the poor girl is going through. I'd call Irréversible a successful combination of ancient, rough exploitation and modern art-house film-making. The brutality portrayed here is typical for the euro-shock cinema but the stylish shooting lifts it up to Cannes Festival material. Cult as pure as it comes!

I just watched Irreversible....very difficult to watch. On the surface, the movie is very exploitive. It simultaneously arouses the two worst feelings possible: anger and helplessness. Below the surface, the movie may be more depressing than the rape of Monica Bellucci and the mistaken vengeance that it inspires. I think there's a deeper philosophical idea underlying this movie and it's not a happy one. At one point we see a poster of 2001: A Space Odyssey as the movie keeps segueing into the past. How is Irreversible related to 2001? Recall how Kubrick showed a very brief glimpse into the prehistory of humans at the beginning of 2001, before leaping far into the future Space Age? And in both time periods, Kubrick's work is imbued with a chronic pessimism about humanity. During the prehistoric era, our capacity to evolve and survive depended on the ability to create crude tools which we promptly used to exterminate rival gangs of pre-humans. In the Space Age our ability to break the bonds of Earth and explore Space depends on our ability to create more sophisticated tools: building and programming supercomputers, like HAL. But eventually that also winds up biting us in the ass. Noe, does the opposite, sort of. He shows segments of three individuals' lives but he starts in the Present and keeps going back further to the past. Noe seems intent on showing how what happens to humans is not just dependent on the past but, in fact, strictly determined by the past. At the end of the movie he has apparently gone all the way back to the Big Bang (Really intense flashing white light and sonic rumbling from the audio track). What is Noe getting at? Is it something more deeply pessimistic than even Kubrick dared imagine? What does Noe mean by the title "Irreversible" ?

Is it that conditions for the subsequent evolution of our universe were fixed by the initial conditions of the Big Bang and nothing can change what happens later; and the really radical idea that this strict determinism applies to human actions just as much as it does to, for example, star formation in some far-flung corner of the universe??? That humans do not in fact possess Free Will but are just part of the universe undergoing changes by responding to forces and psychological pressures which all follow precisely from what has happened in the past?? If this is what Noe is conveying, it is very very DARK in a way that goes beyond Kubrick: we're not just violent and hedonistic, we really don't have any choice in the matter. For Noe, being "One With The Universe" isn't a pop slogan from the 60's accompanied by warm feelings of emotional wellbeing; it's a stark physical fact involving a collapse to nihilism. As Time destroys everything, maybe there are no good or bad deeds, just simply "deeds", or as a physicist would call them, "events". Noe = Nietzsche ??: Psychologically, intelligent beings can't evolve in any other direction: the struggle for existence forces us to conceive of ourselves as Free. One of necessary preconditions in the struggle for survival may be intellectual Error. Our perception of ourselves as free sentient inner-directed Agents: just a little joke played on us by the universe as it bends us over and we take it in the Rectum.

"Irreversible": the universe as one big Process that, once set in motion, will evolve according to it's own laws and cannot be changed even by human awareness of this Process since our awareness is just one aspect that's been set in motion. Anyway, I hope this isn't what Noe intended because it's very depressing. And even if Noe didn't intend this, maybe it's true nonetheless. Scary thought.

If you make it through "Irréversible", then hats off, because you've just passed an endurance test. But what's the point?

Nihilistic to its core, Gaspar Noé presents the story of a young woman who leaves a party only to be brutally raped and beaten in an underpass. Her boyfriend sets off on a vengeance trip with equally tragic results (furthermore, this is all laid out in reverse order). Noé's using both characters to comment on the randomness and cruelty of our world as well as the calamitous nature of revenge. But this is also a movie that bends over backwards to make sure the audience is disoriented, nauseated, and out-of-sorts to even ingest this kind of subject matter -- and that's what I don't get. The ten-minute sexual assault isn't enough, Noé tells this story with a clear hostility towards his viewers. "Irréversible" is a tale told in a sewer; a gutting, homophobic ninety minutes of utter misery.

That said, I think Monica Bellucci deserves massive praise for her fearless performance during the actual assault. It is agonizing, vicious and unbelievably haunting and it took serious conviction to pull this off.

I've sated my curiosity about this movie, but the chances of revisiting this are nil. Life is already too painful to put up with something like this.

Gaspar Noé's Irreversible doesn't seek comfort or catharsis. It disorients, suffocates, and refuses to let up. The relentless rotating shots were meant to trap the viewer in chaos, but for me, they were more exhausting than immersive. Instead of pulling me deeper, they pushed me away, making the experience feel more frustrating than absorbing. It was overwhelming in a way that felt more like a test of patience than a narrative choice.

Nothing is softened or made palatable. Some scenes are so deeply disturbing they feel impossible to endure, but that is the intent. Noé refuses to let the worst of humanity be ignored, dragging reality into the light where it cannot be brushed aside. The reverse chronology settled in naturally after a while. If anything, it made the tragedy hit harder. Watching time strip away the horror, revealing warmth and love underneath, carried a quiet cruelty. Within a single day, life offers both its most beautiful and most devastating moments, and there is no way to change the order in which they arrive.

For me, the importance of this film, is that it shows the sickening reality of violence. So many movies, especially American ones, have people being killed left and right, but the violence is very unrealistic, with little consequence to the characters. The violence here is gritty, brutal and sickening just like my experience of real, close-up and personal violence. There is no concern for the feelings or well-being of others just a savage, out of control bloodlust and desire for destruction. The seedy sexual situations, make the brutality all the more repulsive.

I have just watched "Irreversible" and the only comment I have is that I can remember just one movie, which is so sick, depressing and brutal- "Requiem for a dream". If you like that one, you surely will like "Irreversible". The first 40 minutes are the most cruel ones. Actually, the movie is really sick and is not for everybody. So think twice before watching it. Monica Bellucci is beautiful as always, which actually made me feel worse, because of the things that happen to her. In my opinion most of the people don't wanna watch that kind of movies. Still there are people that "enjoy" them. So if you consider yourself as a normal guy, I suggest you- don't watch the movie unless you want to feel bad afterwards. I watched the movie just because of the idea about the "reverse order" of the things. So, I suppose that they could do another type of movie (for example normal thriller) with the same idea- the things could happen backwards and it would be much more enjoyable. And in the end, if you decide to watch the movie, I wish you good luck :)

I have seen this film only once. It needs multiple viewings, I feel, to fully appreciate it's merit. This is something that will come in time but I felt it was only right to comment after my first impression. I instantly gave the film 10 out of 10, not because I overly enjoyed it (nigh on impossible) but because it shook me, at times, to my very core and affected me in a way that I cannot easily or fully describe. I can honestly say Irreversible is the most devastating piece of cinema I've ever witnessed. This isn't solely due to it's shocking content but more so the production as a whole and how it has been constructed and packaged. It truly is a work of art. Camera-work, lighting, colour (primarily gaudy, striking tones of red and orange) all combine in an unforgettable amalgam of brilliance. Featuring towering performances from Cassel, Belluci and Dupontel the film lurches backward in time depicting the events of a truly tragic night in the lives of three friends. Alex (Belluci) is brutally raped on her way home from a party and Marcus (Cassel) and Pierre (Dupontel) set off determined to wreak vengeance on the perpetrator. However, that is merely the plot. Admittedly quite a simple premise but the way it is played out is unforgettable. This is a film that everyone should and arguably needs to see as it is, for me, a milestone of modern cinema. Raw and unflinching, can you stomach it?

Gaspar Noe's admiration for the late Stanley Kubrik is evident in most of this film. In fact, what is even more surprising is that a movie has been created from such thin material.

This is a film that depends on shocking its audience, as proven by the opening sequences. The credits are nightmarish, as are the scenes that show unrestrained violence perpetuated on the main characters. By confusing the spectator, Mr. Noe creates a suspense, as we all want to know what was the origin of such behavior. Most of this violence, I found, is a turnoff.

Mr. Noe is very clever in telling the story from the present to the past, as it certainly would have been a complete let down to see it in a chronological manner. If the director would have decided to do it differently, half of the theatre would have emptied because the last sections of the film are totally boring.

Did he need to have the scene in the Metro at all? How about the tunnel sequence? Did Mr. Noe have a need to show us in vivid detail what happens to a woman in a situation such as he presents it? Is it necessary to show Vincent Cassel with his 'thang' in full display? How about the disappearing genitalia in the leather bar? For that matter, how about the naked old man at the beginning of the story?

The advice to any would-be-swingers is: carry enough cash for a taxi, just in case the party sucks big time. Oh, and never go into an underpass anywhere in the world late at night, let alone a red tunnel.

Dealing with violence and vengeance Seven and Fight Club are in my opinion much more interesting, not even comparable to this movie.

Why the need to make it a flashback movie like Memento? Only because the story itself is poor. The only thing the story really has, are two of the worst, more disgusting, scenes in the story of film-making.

I didn't particularly appreciate the acting, nor I considered it particularly bad. I didn't find the directing original, nor too bad.

I choose to do not see that movie for a long time, because I don't want to feel bad for violence scenes when they are pointless.

After seeing the movie (actually the uncut version with the rape scene full of the face kicking of Mrs Belluucci face) I asked myself why to watch it, and if sustaining the pain of those two scenes have any sense and if there's any point at all in seeing it.

I don't know. What I do know is that you can look at the first 35 minutes, watching the two disgusting violent scenes and skip the rest, since there's nothing else in that movie.

And about those 35 minutes, is it valuable? I don't know. I am not sure it is. But it's up to you. About how you do feel looking at them, and what thought will come to your mind looking at them and reminding them... Since you will find yourself thinking about them over and over for days.

If that expression of violence is valuable to you or not depends on you.

What I do know is that I would not recommend watching that to anyone young.

If only I could reverse the past 90 minutes and get the wasted time back. If only I didn't have to watch two minutes of nauseating camera rotation between every scene. If only the violence would stop after the first five minutes and not continue until I said after every ongoing scene "Yeah. okay, we get it...violent...horrific...ridiculous. Can you continue with the barely comprehensible and overall simplistic story...". If only there was some art here and not just depraved indecency and an excuse to show extreme brutality. If only you had watched "Memento" which was an excellent film that uses a reverse time-line to tell a story with intelligence and clarity. If only....