[REVIEW] Irréversible: Straight Cut: An Attempt At Reconceptualizing A Brutal Revenge Film

TW: Sexual Assault

This sentiment is the driving force behind Gaspar Noé’s controversial 2003 psychological thriller film Irréversible, a rape-revenge film that emphasizes revenge as a woman’s boyfriend and best friend traverse the seedy underbelly of a city to find the man responsible for sexually assaulting the woman. During its initial release, the film was loudly criticized for its extremely graphic depiction of sexual assault, resulting in both walkouts and sick audience members during its Cannes’ premiere. The film tells the story of Alex (Monica Bellucci), a woman who attends a party in an unfamiliar part of town with her boyfriend Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and ex-lover and current best friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel). The men’s boorish behavior urges her to return home early, inadvertently resulting in her being violently assaulted on her journey home. Despite the extreme nature of the film’s content, it’s considered signature Gaspar Noé, playing with structure to create a dizzying narrative as the film’s events occur in complete reverse chronology.

Over the past 20 years, Gaspar Noé’s filmmaking has evolved, still relying on structure and format to create films that play with your mind but tending to be a tad more introspective. For example, Noé’s most recent film Vortex (2021) follows the daily life of a woman experiencing late-stage dementia and her caretaker husband, telling their stories in-tandem by showing both character’s point-of-view simultaneously on screen. Considering how Noé’s filmmaking has changed, Irréversible is not a film I would expect to get a theatrical re-release twenty years after its premiere due to its graphic depictions of sexual violence and contemporary criticism of egregious depictions of these acts; however, rather than simply re-releasing the film, Noé has recut the film, abandoning its signature backwards chronology for a traditional chronological cut dubbed Irréversible: Straight Cut. 

Such a bold deviation from the structure of the original film feels like Noé battling with the way the narrative reads in chronological and anti-chronological order. In its original, backwards form, Irréversible is the story of how a loving boyfriend is transformed into a vengeful brute due to the catalyst of sexual violence committed against his girlfriend. But in Irréversible: Straight Cut, our film begins with the scenes of Marcus being a loving boyfriend, only for his boorish, drunken behavior to push Alex to leave the party and accidentally result in her attack. The chronological re-cut of the film’s narrative seems to be a stronger condemnation of the film’s male characters with Marcus, who drives Alex to leave the party, and Pierre, who seemingly tries to rekindle their relationship as she leaves and subsequently drives her all the way out the door, contributing to Alex finding herself in a dangerous situation. Early in the film’s chronology, Pierre compares Marcus to an animal, stating roughly that “He fucks. He eats. But he struggles with language”. The recut of the film seems to abandon the original cut’s framing that Marcus is a loving boyfriend seeking blood for blood by giving us this line early on, condemning Marcus’ blood lust as an animalistic, inhumane act of brutality that denies Alex the catharsis of deciding how her attacker should be punished by hunting the man down before the legal system can.

While I think Irréversible: Straight Cut better conceptualizes the film’s commentary for contemporary viewers, the film’s portrayal of rape and violence against women is still extremely graphic and drawn-out. We see every moment of Alex’s assault in a sickening amount of detail. It’s a grotesque sequence that makes your stomach knot up, in part due to the low frequency sound waves Noé has embedded in the film’s soundtrack to trick the human brain into an amplified feeling of dizziness and nausea throughout the film. I struggle to understand why Noé chose to not edit down the attack sequence amidst criticism of drawn-out depictions of rape by male filmmakers. One can perhaps argue that the length of the scene contributes to its impact. Early in the scene, a male bystander witnesses the rape, then walks away without stopping it. The sequence becomes even more heartbreaking and terrifying as the attack continues to stretch on and on, as it becomes increasingly clear that assistance isn’t coming to save Alex because the man chose to not find help. Regardless, Irréversible: Straight Cut still feels dated by the way it focuses on Marcus and Pierre. Besides one or two scenes earlier in the film’s chronology, we get very little of Alex outside of how she’s contextualized in relation to the men in her life and the violence enacted against her.

 Irréversible: Straight Cut remains a film about men committing acts of brutal revenge, turned slightly more nuanced by its reconceptualization in structure. The recut is currently showing throughout the United States in limited theatrical release, though audiences should view the film with caution due to its content matter and depictions.