August 14 2025, 21:32

Irréversible

Director: Gaspar Noé

Release year: 2002

It’s been a couple of days since I watched this, but I needed time to let my thoughts percolate. Irréversible is infamous for the extended and brutally violent rape scene at its centre. The shock of it overwhelmed the critical thinking part of my brain, and it’s rare that I finish a film completely confused. Was it good, bad, clever, disgusting, homophobic, misogynistic, racist, or all of these things? What was Noé trying to achieve? I had to do some reading to help me work out what I thought.

I don’t think the plot of this movie can be spoiled. Noé’s trick is to play the scenes in reverse order, so we see the ending at the start. Its power comes from making the audience see the results of the choices made by the characters before knowing the reasons. The opening/finale is shown with a swirling camera that goes upside down, on its side, making us feel nauseous, while a rumbling drone constantly assaults our ears. We follow Marcus and Pierre into a version of hell. Marcus has lost his mind, but we don’t know why, and the violence he provokes is shocking. We are presented it all without context.

From here, we retreat through the evening. A couple, Alex and Marcus, go to a party with her ex-boyfriend Pierre. When Marcus takes cocaine and becomes aggressive, Alex leaves to go home, and in an underpass she is raped and beaten. Marcus wants revenge and sets out to find the rapist, finding the man in a gay sex club. Marcus gets into a fight, and in protecting Marcus from being raped, Pierre beats the man to death with a fire extinguisher. The police take them both away, but Alex’s rapist escapes justice.

Alex is an intelligent, independent woman, who bristles at Marcus’s view of her as somehow his property. She is surrounded by men who let her down through the evening. When she leaves the party, neither Marcus nor Pierre go with her. The police talk to Marcus and Pierre as if they are the victims of the crime. When Alex is taken to the hospital, instead of going in the ambulance, Marcus is tempted by local gangsters into seeking revenge, and Pierre goes with him. These are selfish decisions that leave Alex vulnerable and alone.

The further into the film we go, the closer we get to who Alex is, and the pace slows, there is more intimacy and tenderness, and the weight of what has happened to a woman with everything to live for hits home.

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