Critics reviews

Admittedly, Irreversible is more horrific drama than straight-up horror. But it's the film's formal qualities and narrative structure that propel it to true horror, the spinning camera evoking nausea as the subject matter reflects a journey to hell and back.

Without the luxury of nearly thirty hours of previous narrative to build on [like The Sopranos], Irreversible instead chooses to grab viewers by the lapels with swirly-twirly camerawork (during the first handful of sequences, the camera floats, spins, and undulates, seemingly to induce motion sickness), showboating compositions, and deafening audio effects.

That first act, the eating of the forbidden fruit, brought sin and death into the world and all our woe, and now every first act of conception and birth brings death into the world anew. "Time destroys all". The beginning is ever a harbinger of the end.

The cinema of attractions employed by Noé in his latest film go so far beyond what he used in his debut feature that spectators were fainting at the beginning of the film at the Cannes premiere, perhaps from the vertiginously tilting opening titles that run backwards and the grinding, undulating bass tones that accompany them.

Gasper Noé's Irreversible, from his own convoluted screenplay, convinces me as nothing else so far that I have reached the point of diminishing returns with movies that pretend to be profound by having their pulpy, banal stories told backwards and sideways and upside-down.

Noe's summation is an ideological sucker-punch from a filmmaker who gets off on abusive relationships. He may as well have thrown a big ''whatever'' up on the screen.

In spite of being stupid and odious, Irreversible is still interesting for the way it plays with the viewer's nerves. I can't bring myself to call it "worth seeing" for most people, but I also can't deny that it's made with a great deal of skill or that some of its ideological confusion can be learned from—as long as it's recognized as confusion.

Which is worse, feeling a visceral scene so intensely that you might become sick? Or staring at a scene so horrific that you feel guilty? Challenging notions of watching sex and violence in cinema with a unique compare and contrast of unpleasantly, one has a hard time knowing exactly what to feel-but he's a good enough filmmaker to create something other than simple shock... Feral yet eloquent, Irreversible is a work of painful, vicious poetry.

And Alex? She has no place in this dialectic; she's just meat, packaged in revealing satin one minute, pounded into hamburger the next. Noe, with his Nietzsche-for-knuckleheads nihilism and extreme-cinema ambitions, clearly fancies himself a visionary, but mounting a camera on a roller coaster or putting a story into rewind doesn't make a film formally adventurous or interesting.

It feels like a parlor trick, or in this case, a particularly volatile game of three-card monte, a mixture of Godard and William Friedkin. The frenzied momentum churns up a lot of adrenaline and stomach acid for Irréversible. But the performances certainly don't stir up much emotion. Except for the sodden Mr. Dupontel -- whose shadings of remorse bring the only real feeling to the film's morbid intensity -- no one else creates a character. And it's why Irréversible is ultimately forgettable.

Noé's final message (the pretentious intimations of the cosmic in the film's last shot aside) is a bracingly humane one, which is that actions have consequences, and that you should be really careful of the way you treat people you profess to care about. Yes, Noé's methods are unorthodox, to say the least. But this confrontationalist is a moviemaker worth confronting, if you've got the stomach for it.

Flee the theater in horror if you must, but to accuse Noé of engaging in adolescent shock tactics, as many have, is to take comfort in the aestheticization of brutality—to argue, in effect, that it's only acceptable to depict sexual violence if one glosses over or elides its ugliness. On the contrary, there's an integrity in choosing not to look away, and whatever twisted enjoyment Noé may derive from pure extremism doesn't negate that integrity—those impulses can coexist.