Written by Grady Fiorio
Original Publishing Date: March 20th, 2023
Rating: Irreversible 5/5 Irreversible: Straight Cut 3.5/5
You're going to double-feature the same movie? You're damn right I am.
One Night. One tunnel. One life. Nothing can be taken back. Irreversible is the highly controversial 2002 film by Argentine-French sadist, Gaspar Noe. Starring at the time real-life married couple, Monica Belluci and Vincent Cassale, Irreversible revolves around one night gone horribly wrong as a woman is brutally raped in an underpass tunnel, as her boyfriend descends into a violent manhunt for the man responsible, all told in reverse chronological order. A deconstruction of rape, violence, and the destructive nature of time, Irreversible is a soul-searching descent into the coldest depths of man. In this world, nothing can be taken back. Everything is irreversible. Declared by some to be Noe's best work, it is also decried by many to be an exploitative shock film, lacking a higher purpose. What makes Irreversible stand out from other rape-revenge thrillers is its narrative structure. Taking a queue from Christopher Nolan, Irreversible rewinds its narrative and is told from end to beginning. Starting with the credit roll and then opening during the chronological end of the events, slowly going into each next scene revealing new key details about the plot. This untraditional storytelling style gives a new perspective to a tale old as time. Instead of relishing in the aftermath, Irreversible shows you what is lost, everything that is taken away, and the life that once was. The way, Saving Private Ryan presents the brutal violent futility of war, Irreversible presents the vicious, brutal, cold-hearted act of rape. A complete and utter violation of the body, mind, and spirit. An act of pure love warped into an act of pure hate.
As you can imagine, Irreversible has been subject to many controversies. When the film initially premiered at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, 250 people left the theater. Even 20 people fainted before the film's end. This is in no doubt due to the film's unrelenting brutality, but it's also due to the film's brilliant use of technical trickery. Throughout the film, Noe uses unique camera movements to visually connect back to the film's themes. During the film's first half, the camera is constantly moving in wild spins and 360s. To make matters even worse, Noe pits the sound design against the audience by playing a low 20htz vibrating frequency, that while inaudible, triggers both nausea and fight or flight sense in your brain. It's an old film trick called sensurround, but it really hasn't been used since the '70s (since it was seen mostly as a gimmick, like smell-o-vision), and Irreversible is the only film to use it since. This in combination with the camera and brutal nature of the film, makes its first half (and specifically first 20 minutes) a true endurance test. The film is so hard to watch, that on my original go around, it took me two tries. I just couldn’t take the initial brutality and viscousness Noe smears across the screen. However, since then I've seen the film three times. Twice at home, and once in the theater. Even on the small screen, the camera twirls combined with Noe's sound design are just as nausea-inducing, but the film's powerful message makes it all worth it. After hearing this you're probably thinking to yourself "Wow, Grady. You’ve willingly subjected yourself to this film three times. You must be pretty fucked in the head!” Why yes I am. Thank you for noticing.
While some of the aforementioned tools Noe implements may come off as gimmicks, he has one more trick up his sleeve. Before 1917, Birdman, or hell even God of War, Irreversible was shot in a no-cut style, where the film is designed to look like one continuous take. This is incredibly impressive given that the events of the film take place in reverse order, which again becomes even more mindblowing when you learn that the film had no script! There was a three-page document on the basic plot, and Noe just ran with it. The vast majority of the dialogue was improvised, giving it a very natural feel for the high stakes of the film. I rarely use the word genius, but son of a bitch if that ain’t genius I don’t know what is. I understand that Noe's tastes may be too eccentric for some, but even his biggest detractors can't deny that his technical creativity is quite impressive. It takes a combination of a truly visionary director, world-class actors, and a crew that’s prepared for anything to make that kind of seamless magic, and somehow they pulled it off.
Now, I'm not one for trigger warnings, but if you haven't figured it out by now, this movie gets into some pretty heavy stuff. Noe gets brutal, and I'm not going to disservice the film by shying away. I’m also going to spoil the film through and through. That being said it’s not really a film you can “spoil” in the traditional sense. There are a few surprise reveals, but this isn’t The Sixth Sense. Irreversible doesn’t hide its intentions. Instead, it’s all about the experience, and to talk about that experience, I'm gonna lay it all out on the table. You've been warned.
To first understand Irreversible, we need to understand its plot in chronological order. The order is as follows.
Section 1: Epilogue
- Alex, a young woman, unassumingly reads a book in the park as the sun shines and children play around her.
Section 2: Alex and Marcus
- Alex and her boyfriend Marcus, wake up from a post-sex nap, discussing a dream Alex had regarding a vision of a red tunnel split in two. After discussing the nature of fate being written in dreams, Marcus laments the fact that Alex's former lover Pierre, will be joining them at a party later that night.
- While Marcus is out buying drinks for the party, Alex discovers that she is pregnant.
Section 3: The Subway
- Alex, Marcus, and Pierre take the subway to the party. While riding the train, Pierre pries a bit too deep into Alex and Marcus' sex life, wondering if it lead to his break up with Alex.
Section 4: The Party
- Now at the party, Marcus tries to get Pierre to partake in some classic sex, drugs, and rock n' roll, but Pierre ain't buying what Marcus is selling. Assuming that it's a shame to let all that cocaine and single women go to waste, Marcus decides to indulge himself. Pierre wanders off to find Alex.
- Alex dances while Pierre awkwardly stands as they discuss what went wrong between the two of them.
- Later, as Alex anxiously talks with a pregnant friend, Marcus incoherently disrupts them, frustrating Alex and causing her to leave the party.
Section 5: The Red Tunnel
- Alex tries to hail a taxi but they all keep passing her by. She decides to walk to the metro station instead.
- While walking through an underpass tunnel, Alex is attacked and raped by La Tenia (The Tapeworm), a coked-up, violent pimp.
- A passerby sees La Tenia raping Alex. The passerby keeps walking.
- La Tenia beats Alex against the pavement and flees the scene.
Section 6: The Realization
- As Marcus and Pierre leave the party, they see Alex being wheeled out on a stretcher into an ambulance, to which Marcus breaks down sobbing.
- Marcus and Pierre are questioned by police to try and find a lead on the assailant.
- Marcus and Pierre are approached by nearby vigilantes, who promise for a fee, they can help Marcus find the assailant and kill him.
- Even though Pierre tries to convince Marcus otherwise, Marcus begins his violent trail of revenge.
Section 7: The Search
- Marcus and the vigilantes interrogate street prostitutes on the whereabouts of the assailant. Pierre tries to keep Marcus and the vigilantes from getting violent, but violence continues to emerge.
- One of the prostitutes reveals that the assailant is La Tenia and that he was headed to a sex nightclub.
Section 8: The Manhunt
- Marcus and Pierre ditch the vigilantes and search for the nightclub. After taking a cab, Marcus gets frustrated with the driver and steals the car.
- Marcus pulls over at a nearby shop to ask if they know where the nightclub is.
- Pierre leaves the cab and smashes the windows with a golf club, telling Marcus that he's done going on this violent, incoherent goose chase.
- Finally with a lead, Marcus runs into the streets to find the club.
Section 9: Answers
- Marcus scrambles through the club asking for La Tenia, and after going from person to person, he finds La Tenia with a group of people.
- Marcus asks La Tenia and his group if they know who La Tenia is, to which one of La Tenia's friends aggressively pushes back at Marcus.
- Believing that this friend is La Tenia, Marcus starts a fight, to which he becomes quickly overpowered by La Tenia's friend and gets his arm broken.
- La Tenia's friend starts to unbuckle his pants to rape Marcus, but before he can get them off, Pierre storms in with a fire extinguisher and kills the assailant by bashing in his skull repeatedly.
- La Tenia watches from the sideline as he watches his friend get beaten to death, with a smile on his face, realizing that they got the wrong guy.
- Marcus is wheeled out of the club on a stretcher and lifted into an ambulance.
Section 10: Prologue
- Two old, drunken men discuss their past mistakes in life.
What immediately sets the stage for what's to come is the heart-pounding score from Thomas Bangalter (one-half of French duo Daft Punk). It's hypnotic, energizing, and terrifying, throwing you into the drug-fueled mind of a man on a violent rampage of revenge. As the lights flash and the camera spins as if it was in freefall, the music kicks with heart-pounding drums and an electronic score that rattles your core. You feel the violence coursing through your veins as the tensions and frustrations mound as Marcus searches for La Tenia. As an audience member, your brain doesn't know what's coming, but your heart knows it's not going to be good.
The secret sauce that makes Irreversible work so well is its aforementioned structure. It’s the same Hitchcock principle of revealing the threat to the audience before the characters. Even the dull moments bring high anxiety because we're waiting for the bomb to explode. Except here we see the bomb explode first, then we see the fuse lit. Chaos followed by serenity is rarely a combination that we see as an audience. Having our viewing experience changed in such a dramatic way makes Noe’s direction that much more effective and timeless. It’s the only film that’ll make you cry at people living everyday, peaceful lives. So much of Irreversible’s power comes from seeing the before. What a life is like before it is irrevocably destroyed. The happiness, the joy, the pitfalls, and the unassuming bliss before the walls are destined to come crashing down. As an audience, all we can do is watch knowing what fate beholds the innocent.
While I could go on about the many unflinchingly brutal scenes of Irreversible, the most difficult but most important is the rape scene. Ironically, despite much of Noe's flashy directing style, here he takes an opposite approach. Once the scene begins Noe sets the camera on the floor, turns off the music, and makes you watch for nine completely unbroken minutes. It’s unbearable. It puts you in the scene, and all you can do is watch. At its peak, Alex reaches her arms out to the camera as if she’s begging the audience for help, yet we can do nothing. We are entirely powerless to the forces against us. It is the most brutal sequence ever commuted to film, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen something so effective. Irreversible explores the dark side of empathy. To understand Alex, we need to be as close to her mindset as possible. Truly live and breathe in those moments. In these incredibly dark moments, our limits of understanding are challenged. It's a fight within ourselves, but it's a fight worth having to better understand the pain of others.
In the film community, there's been a long-standing conversation around this scene. Some even claiming that the graphic nature glorifies the act, to which I say is foolish and absurd. Anyone who walks away from that scene feeling as if rape has been glorified should walk right into a psychiatrist's office. To be honest, I think most of the controversy around this film is unwarranted. Irreversible is undoubtedly a bleak and violent film that is hard to watch, and it is NOT for everyone. I can appreciate that. But what I don't understand is the outcry to censor and dismantle the film. Some have questioned the ethics of the scene, but all records and interviews of the production come up clean. Rehearsals, coordinators, and long discussions about the scene kept all actors safe and comfortable given the context. While nine uncut minutes of rape seems excessive, in a 2002 interview with The Guardian, Noe stated "I didn't know if it would last for six minutes, 10 minutes, 12 minutes or whatever. The whole scene was in her (Monica Bellucci's) hands and even the guy who was playing the rapist was at her service. If she didn't want to do the scene like that, she would have said it. I really admire her for having taken that scene so far." All control was left to Belluci. I think the real outcry comes from facing the harshness of reality. Most people aren't ready to go to the other side, see the cruelty that exists in our cities, our own homes. The facade of ignorance will always be preferable to seeing the suffering of reality, but if we don't understand it we can't make things better.
Irreversible is undoubtedly a complex film, and to boil it down as simply "anti-rape" doesn't do proper justice to everything this film achieves. "Rape is bad" is an idea that most sane people can grasp. Instead, Irreversible is about what rape, violence, and time, take away from us. Our decisions ripple throughout the universe and undeniably affect others. La Tenia forced a decision onto Alex that ripped her life apart. Pierre can't undo the killing of La Tenia's friend. And nothing can change Marcus' decision to let Alex leave alone that night. There's no going back to the way things once were. On top of this, the film also explores the idea of destiny and prewritten fate, particularly those revealed through dreams. This is an idea Noe would return to in his 2021 film Vortex. Nearing the film’s chronological beginning Alex describes a dream she has of a red tunnel splitting in two. This, of course, is a callback to the rape scene, but also serves as a call back to the film's opening and chronological end where two unnamed men discuss their own mistakes in life, trapped in their own prisons, a thematic mirror to Marcus and Pierre. It's a reoccurring theme that perfectly hits at three central points in the film. However, Noe challenges his own thematic question when Alex mentions the tunnel splitting in two. Is this meant to be literal? A tunnel has to have an entrance and exit, two pieces. Or is it something more metaphorical? Could Alex's fate have been avoided? Is there such a thing as fate? Or is the chaos of our lives completely undetermined like asteroids crashing into each other?
So now that we've talked quite a bit about Irreversible, what's this "Straight Cut"? Well dear reader, as you may have put two and two together, Irreversible Straight Cut is a straight cut of Irreversible. It puts together the events in proper chronological order, while also chopping a bit of the transitional material between scenes to still allow for the no-cut style of filmmaking (hence the slightly shorter runtime). And the results? Good, but not great. It's hard following up on what is already a phenomenal film, but cutting out one of the film's main selling points is an odd choice. Yet, there is an undoubted curiosity for what a chronological cut of the film might look like. For years a fan-made bootleg floated through the internet and underground cult video stores, but Noe made it official when he did a re-edit himself and premiered it at the 2019 Venice Film Festival. What's left after a return to the cutting room floor is a still powerful, but less fulfilling version of the film. The original cut of the film is like having the answers but not knowing the question. As an audience member, you're constantly working to put the pieces together. It’s a much more active viewing experience.
The major change of the Straight Cut's new structure is that the original climactic moments of the film are now setups without payoffs, the most glaring of these being Alex’s pregnancy. When this is revealed in the original cut, it is a moment of realization, tragedy, and loss. It’s the ultimate final punch for what we know is to come. An awful realization for the audience, and an unsuspecting climax for the characters. In the Straight Cut, this completely changes the context of the scene. The original ending also loses some of its power. The final scene of Alex relaxing in the grassy park as children play and dance around her is an epilogue of dread and tragedy. It’s everything we know that is to come and will be. It’s the dream of the tunnel and her fate set in stone. It’s time that will destroy everything. The now prologue turned epilogue gives us something to think about, but it doesn't feel like an ending, and that's because it's not. The only thing gained from this new structure is that it gives you a better sense of the characters intentions, but in doing so it loses some of the weight of the tragedy. If you’ve never seen the original cut, then the Straight Cut will still be a powerful experience, but you won’t realize what you're missing out on.
Something important I wanted to bring attention to was the film's poster, specifically the one I used at the beginning of this review. You may have noticed that I didn’t use the film's original poster. Instead, I used a fan-made poster that I felt conveyed the idea of the film better than the original. However, my biggest issue is that the face on the poster is not Alex, but rather the friend of La Tenia (aka the guy who gets his face bashed in with the fire extinguisher). You can tell by the hairline. Many of the fan posters I came across focused on the fire hydrant scene instead of Alex, and while that scene definitely leaves a lasting impression early on, it’s not what the film is about. That being said in my own mental gymnastics I interpret the face on the poster to be Alex, after the rape when her head is beaten against the pavement by La Tenia. Stripped of identity and soul, all that’s been left of her by her assailant is a bloodied pulp ground against the pavement. Her sense of self, soul, and security has been taken away. She has been demoralized in the most awful way possible, and this poster reflects that. It reflects a face with no identity. Eyes that cannot see. A mouth that cannot scream. Only the bloody stain of time that cannot be wiped away. A shell of what once was, and unclear what will be. I can only imagine that after facing such horrific trauma if you looked in the mirror, that’s what you’d see. That poster speaks volumes when you look beyond the fire hydrant.
Even after paragraph after paragraph, I can't express enough how powerful of a film Irreversible is. Noe is a master of his craft and provides an experience most should have, but few ever will. Maybe by intention, maybe by design. Noe's film is a loving look at hate and the boundary that an audience will push themselves in the name of empathy. It's a film for the ages and a classic for the masochists. It takes a forward-thinking audience to accept the work of a forward-thinking filmmaker, but those who submit and take the plunge will find something new inside of themselves that they may not have realized was there before. For every film that focuses on what's on screen, Noe is one of the few filmmakers who points the camera at us and asks "Who will you be?"
Irreversible
Director Gaspar Noe
Runtime 1 Hr 34 Min
Format Digital (DVD)
Release Date 2002
Irreversible: Straight Cut
Director Gaspar Noe
Runtime 1 Hr 26 Min
Format Digital (DCP)
Release Date 2019