Irreversible: An Intoxicated and Unbiased Review

I normally don't write film reviews on this website, but I just finished one that deserves it. Plus, I'm drunk.

Irreversible is a film about a woman who is brutally raped, and her boyfriend who seeks revenge. The scenes are played in reverse order (like Memento). Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel star. I have a secret crush on both of them.

This movie serves to invoke a million emotions at once. The first half-hour of the film is viewed through wobbly, unrestrained camera work and a deep, nauseating, droning sound effect. This, according to the filmmaker, was done purposely to mess with the viewer's senses and warn about the events to come. Apparently many people at the Cannes film festival walked out of the screening because of this (according to imdb's trivia page).

Shortly after follows one of (if not the) most disturbing scene in film I've ever seen: Monica Bellucci is brutally raped in a tunnel. Everything about this scene is meant to attack every sense of empathetic emotion you could ever hold in your puny little brain, from the color to the sound to the camera angle to the acting to the writing to the everything to the millionth degree. It's more brutal than Saving Private Ryan and The Passion of the Christ. And it is brilliant in its execution.

With that scene in mind, the film continues toward the scenes preceding that event. There are subtle allusions and reverse foreshadowing to Bellucci's rape, and other details piece into place the relationship between the three main characters.

If this film contains the most brutal scene I've ever watched, it also contains one of the most beautiful: Monica Bellucci and her on-screen boyfriend (but real-life husband) Vincent Cassel are lying in bed naked. She is sleeping on his chest hours before the rape occurs. To me this scene represents the epitome of human perfection, but then again I'm a crazy drunk.

Perhaps Irreversible is a movie that critics will love or hate (though it has largely garnered positive reviews, from what I've seen), but it's certainly not the type of movie anybody will want to watch for enjoyment. It's both beautiful and savage, and to me, something that can evoke such polarized emotions is truly a work of art.