I was sitting in my living room enjoying my catchup time listening to an episode of the /FilmCast to hear Mr. Dave Chen speak of Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible. So to say that I was warned would be an understatement. Something about how Dave Chen described his feelings for the film just made me have to find a copy of the film and check it out.

The extent of my knowledge of Gaspar Noé’s filmography to this point was that I’ve seen the first hour of his latest film Enter The Void, which I must say I found very interesting and have every intention of completing sometime soon, and that’s about it. This movie however has so many similar things stylistically but is so different. While Enter The Void seems to delve into some existential themes this movie is a very grounded look at what one messed up night can bring your life to a crashing halt and make you change course completely.

The film, my apologies for not explaining sooner, is about this one night where Alex (Monica Bellucci) is raped and how her boyfriend, Marcus (Vincent Cassel), and ex-boyfriend and friend to Marcus, Pierre (Albert Dupontel), end up going out to get revenge. However, unlike every other revenge tale that you’ve seen on screen this story is told in reverse chronologically.

The film doesn’t only set itself apart from the rest by presenting the story in reverse but just by being the experimentally shot film that it is. Every transition to every moment we spend on this night with Marcus, Pierre and Alex is just given to us with the same feeling that is being felt in that very moment by the characters.

During the first third of the film when we’re watching Marcus and Pierre after Alex is attacked and they’re out on the town in search of the man who did this to Alex the camera moves so quickly and sometimes is barely keeping our characters in frame so as to create a general feeling of what Marcus must be thinking and feeling. Throughout his entire revenge plot the camera is waving all over the place just like you can see Marcus is. Even though Marcus has a definite goal that he’s working towards, he’s out of control and it shows in every part of his being.

When we hit the second act, and we eventually get to the rape scene, it’s the first time that Gaspar Noé lets the camera stay still and let us observe. I walked into this movie imagining that watching this very honest scene of watching Alex being raped would be complete torture, and not to in any way say that this act/crime is an okay thing, but I didn’t feel as ruined mentally as I was during a lot more harmful scenes like in films such as Requiem for a Dream and Antichrist (yes those are my benchmarks). For me after sitting through the first act watching Marcus’ pain and anguish was enough to prepare me for the pivotal scene. I imagine what it would be like to watch this movie completely fresh without knowing that that’s what happened to bring Marcus to this point, which is impossible because even if you don’t know this before you press play we learn that a rape is what’s pushed him to this action through the film’s dialogue.

Where I get into critical territory is in the third act. I definitely would be complaining about the film being anticlimactic if we didn’t get to see what happened earlier in the night before the second act, but somehow I don’t think it was completely necessary to get that much back story about these characters. It was great to see Alex and Marcus together in their loving state and to see how well the actors, who’re actually a married couple in real life, work together and how Pierre fits into that weird dynamic but at the same time I felt that this act had only speckles of information that was necessary to the story that the director wanted to tell. Definitely seeing the similarities and differences between how Alex responds to Marcus’ sexual advances and how she responds when she’s raped is interesting and Alex ends up giving us a sort-of thesis for the film’s plot while discussing a book she’s currently reading, but otherwise it’s a lot of lead up that wasn’t needed since I already knew the end. However, with that said I’d at no point recommend that this film be told in any other way, the reverse chronology works so well that I can forgive the at times overabundance of a third act.

IMDB says  7.3/10
Rotten Tomatoes says 56%
I say 8.5/10