Review of Irreversible (2002) by Duradek N — 08 Jul 2012

Fucking brilliant. Always fascinating, compelling, and riveting. One of the most disturbing things I've ever seen. I didn't feel the violence was gratuitous at all. It may seem a little excessive at first, but once you understand the characters more, it's understandable.

I'm not saying it's excusable, or that anything these characters did was right, but you can clearly see where they're coming from. Contrary to what I was led to believe, the most fascinating part of the movie was not the rape scene.

That scene is brilliant, terrifying, and I was horrified and wanted it to end and I've never really felt that way during a movie where it was just awful, awful, awful, which is exactly how a rape scene should be.

The scene is also shot perfectly, giving you an unnerving sense of dread before it even begins because you know what's coming, and building a shit ton of suspense, and essentially setting the camera down in one place the whole damn time so you can't escape and you're left staring at a terrifying act of pure fucking evil and you can do nothing about it.

Reflecting right now, I don't know how that scene could've been made better for what it was. But, even so, the most fascinating part of the movie for me was seeing these three characters interact before everything goes to shit.

Watching them was so ridiculously real and interesting because of their extremely unique love triangle/relationship thing/whatever the fuck you would call that. I'm not sure if more movies should use this style because it's hard to make something as good as this.

In most movies, you're introduced to a character while they're going about their day to day routine, and when shit happens, you see how they respond. In Irreversible, the first time you see these characters is when they have been completely pushed over the edge, and later you see them calm.

I'm just repeating myself. Whatever. Blah blah blah. Amazing movie. Gaspar Noe's a fucking genius.