Irreversible Details

Love it or despise it, Gaspar Noé's incendiary follow-up to Seul contre Tous is hard to watch, and, once seen, hard to forget. An intense and unflinching nightmare of rape and revenge, it is a haunting meditation on the fragility of life. Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci bare their souls magnificently as a middle-class couple who are plunged into a personal hell after Bellucci is brutally raped and left for dead. Utilising inventive cinematography that tints every scene with acid-trip dementia, the film unfolds in reverse, Memento-style, to embrace and deconstruct the whole spectrum of human emotion. From the opening explosion of tragic retaliatory violence, each single-angle sequence takes a step back in time, illuminating effect, then cause, before finally restoring the tranquillity and innocence that preceded these terrible acts. It's distressing viewing that requires a strong stomach, yet, for all the feature's controversy, it never titillates. Instead, Noé delivers a masterpiece of naked honesty that demands its audience be affronted, rather than entertained, by the horrors it depicts.

"...Noe's considerable accomplishment is to examine the relationship between life and art, time and memory. IRREVERSIBLE means to knock you for a loop. It does..."