Irreversible

Name: Irreversible
Director: Gaspar Noé
Genre: Crime/detective, Drama, Mystery, Thriller
Released: 2002
Duration: 1 h 33 min
Cast: Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel, Albert Dupontel, Philippe Nahon, Jo Prestia

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Crime/detective
Drama

2002
Gaspar Noé
93 mins
18

Summary

Powerful and controversial drama told backwards, starring Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci. Passionate middle-class couple Alex and Marcus have their idyllic lives destroyed when Alex is raped and left for dead on the way home from a party. Blinded by fury, Marcus sets out to have his revenge, with tragic consequences.

IMDB

Review

A star rating of 4 out of 5.

Sloan Freer

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.

imdb-square

7.3/10