Irreversible (2002)

Review by Adam C. Thomas



Directed by Gaspar Noe
Irreversible is, at it’s core, a revenge story. It’s about Marcus searching for the man who raped and tortured his wife. It’s also a love story, but not in the conventional sense. It asks the question “How far would you go to avenge the ones you love?” The layers of story and plot in this movie are so thick, most people won’t watch it. There is a lot to take in and consider about this movie. It deals with the human emotion, and the limits a person is willing to go to in order to rectify the people they love being wronged.

It doesn’t play like a normal movie, though. It plays from the final scene, at the very beginning of the movie, to the first scene in the last minutes. There are several very long scenes in the movie that are incredibly difficult to watch, including a manhunt through an underground S&M club, the aforementioned rape which lasts the better part of ten minutes, and a few others. The camera work is very unique in the sense that it hardly ever focuses solely on the characters and what’s going on until well into the film. You still get an idea of what’s going on, but it seems like someone has tied the camera to a string and is swinging it around while recording. It’s easy to develop motion sickness watching this movie, but it only serves to make the movie better.

The movie makes the viewer develop this feeling of dread, because while you’re watching it, you know what has happened, and you start to feel this intense sorrow for Marcus because there is nothing he can do about what’s going on, although there were many opportunities for him to correct the little things in the beginning that he flat out ignored.

I could go on and on about this movie, because like I said, there are myriad layers of plot here. This is easily one of those movies I will be talking about for a long time, and watching over and over again, simply because there is so much to discuss about this movie, one viewing simply doesn’t cut it.

I give this movie a 10 out of 10.