Irreversible Rating:  Starring: Monica Belluci, Vincent Cassel, Albert Dupontel, P
UK Certificate: 18
If your idea of a good night out is watching the antics of an apprentice wizard child driving an old Ford Anglia, stay away from Irreversible. This is not something you can wander into and leave unscathed an hour and a half later: this is the film that led to mass walkouts, fainting and puking during its European festival run last summer. If you do decide to watch this, be prepared to surrender yourself to a grueling, distressing experience. Told backwards (like Memento), it follows a man's (Cassel) revenge odyssey through the seediest, scummiest depths of Paris after his girlfriend (Bellucci) suffers a brutal (and lengthy) sexual assault. French director Gaspar No wanted to portray rape as it is, and the result is appropriately horrific. And unless you've actually seen someone repeatedly pummel someone else's face in with a fire extinguisher, you've never seen violence like this before. Saying that, Irreversible is not an exercise in shock - there are beautiful, natural love scenes, in their own way just as intense as the brutalities.
It's an exhausting, scarily convincing wake-up call that will open your eyes and re-sensitise your fragile mind. Arguably not the perfect first-date movie, but you owe it to yourself to see it.
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