The most disturbing scene that made a movie feel real
Gaspar Noé's "Irreversible" so disgusted the gathered audience when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival that newspaper reports estimated 10% of the 2,400 gathered viewers walked out of the movie (according to Tim Palmer's retrospective on "Contemporary French Cinema of the Body").
Following closely on the heels of "Memento," which was released a couple of years earlier, "Irreversible" is similarly structured with its scenes shown in reverse chronological order. It begins with Marcus (Vincent Cassel) furiously hunting for the man who raped his girlfriend, Alex (Monica Bellucci), and beat her into a coma. The rape itself is depicted midway through the film in a single, grueling, unblinking take, and "Irreversible" is notorious for its similarly dispassionate depiction of a man gradually, brutally getting his face caved in by a fire extinguisher.
What makes "Irreversible" so unique, despite being so hard to watch, is the way in which it turns the usual rape-revenge tropes on its head. The "money shot" (of the supposed rapist's head being crushed) comes at the start of the film, and it's eventually revealed that the man who was killed was not even the man who raped Alex. There's no feeling of catharsis as the movie winds towards its incongruently serene ending — only a growing sense of tragedy as we're shown what no amount of revenge will ever be able to restore. (Hannah Shaw-Williams)
