REVIEW: DVD Release: Irreversible

Film: Irreversible
Release date: 4th December 2006
Certificate: 18
Running time: 97 mins
Director: Gaspar Noé
Starring: Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci, Albert Dupontel
Genre: Drama/Crime
Studio: Tartan
Format: DVD
Country: France

Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible comes with a fearsome reputation. On its release in 2002, reports from the Cannes Film Festival told of innumerable walkouts, oxygen being administered in the foyer to distressed patrons, and a rape scene which left even the most hardened critic reaching for a stiff drink. Lorded by some as groundbreaking, dismissed by others as cheap, vile exploitation. Now, eight years on, it’s a chance to return to this most polarising of works and take a fresh look at Irreversible without the controversy and hysteria that dogged its release.

The story takes place over the course of one night in Paris. Middle class couple Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Alex (Monica Bellucci) spend an evening at a party accompanied by their friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel), who is also Alex’s ex. Alex leaves the party early, and in a nearby underpass she is assaulted, brutally raped and beaten in a fixed camera shot which lasts a full nine minutes. Then follows a frenzied race through the streets of Paris as Marcus and Pierre attempt to find and exact revenge on Alex’s attacker.

The film is told in reverse order, beginning at the club to where Marcus and Pierre track down the assailant and working backwards through the events of the evening...


To start by addressing the elephant in the room: yes, the rape is every bit as horrific as you have heard. Harrowing, relentless, savage - and totally justified. This isn’t cinema rape. There are no cuts, no clever angles and no sympathetic score. The scene is stark, ugly and brutal; everything a real rape is. We’re left reeling, utterly nauseated at the scene and at ourselves for watching it. We feel violated, but, unlike poor Alex, we asked to be there. Noé’s techniques aren’t as accusatory as Michael Haneke’s for example (who famously forced us to confront our own appetites for violence in Funny Games) but they’re every bit as confrontational.

Noé’s camerawork is extraordinary. Here the camera is not merely a passive viewfinder but an active participant – inquisitive, accusatory, snaking through the Parisian underbelly apparently unfettered by the limits of physics. We travel through the city like a ghost, passing effortlessly through walls and car windows, capable of travelling impossible distances in seconds. It’s a tribute to Noé that these extraordinary visual techniques never feel like trickery, rather like he’s tapped into our subconscious and somehow we’re one with the lens. The journey into the bowels of the gay club at the start feel like a descent into hell, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life and is a genuinely unsettling experience. After almost ten minutes of constantly spinning and flashing images of degradation and a lurching atonal soundtrack, one feels physically uneasy, your skin crawling and heart in your throat. When we later arrive at the assault in the underpass, the screen locks completely to a fixed shot; oppressive and unforgiving - as if Noé is punishing us for our roving eyes.

Monica Bellucci does an incredible job as Alex especially in what must have been an exceptionally difficult scene to film, but this is really Vincent Cassel’s film. We’re used to seeing him now in big budget global features, but this performance reminds us why he rose to the top of the European scene. His performance is feral and explosive. Stalking the streets like an animal, he looks like the very embodiment of rage. That the action is played out in reverse order means that we are made the confused, terrified onlooker in every scene, reeling from Marcus’s escalating fury as he descends further and further into the depths of delirious, vengeful savagery. The reverse order also forces us to play detective like Marcus, so while he’s chasing up leads to find out where his hunt will take him next, we’re busy piecing together the chain of events which have led up to the situations currently taking place.

The story is told at a breakneck pace until the third act when everything slows down, Noé’s ferreting camera included. Seeing Marcus and Alex together at home, relaxed, in love and planning a future; these scenes are loaded with the knowledge of what’s about to happen and their blissful ignorance to it. While there are countless reminders of how the tragedy could have been averted (by circumstance, different decisions, or the heartbreaking silhouetted shape of a would-be saviour passerby who takes a fleeting glance at the rape before fleeing the scene), this is a film about the inevitability of things. Alex quotes from a book: “The future is already written, and the proof is in premonitory dreams,” and reveals her own such dream late on in the film. The sense of helplessness on our part to be able to intercede only compounds the sense that this is fate, unavoidable.


Irreversible is a monumental achievement. From its inspirational camerawork and truly unique soundscape to the depictions of violence and rage, the film leaves behind images burned indelibly on the brain. It’s not just the events of the story the title is referring to; the experience we have just sat through is one we will never completely be free of. If you have it in you, watch Irreversible. This is an exceptional, important film from one of the true visionaries of modern cinema. LB