Of all the films included in the Midnight Selections, Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible is the most divisive. It is also, arguably, the most extreme. To say that this is not a movie for everyone is an understatement; the film notoriously sparked over 200 walkouts during its premiere screening at Cannes, but it also received a five-minute standing ovation from the 2000 people who saw it through until the end. Whether are not this is a movie for you depends a lot on your tolerance of extreme content, your acceptance of material that has been criticized by some as being homophobic (more on this point later), and your acceptance of all of its art house flourishes.

–I want to note here that due to the divisive nature of this film, I am going to provide more details than usual.  There will be spoilers.

Irreversible, like Christopher Nolen’s Memento, is a story told in reverse chronological order. (Other films have done this as well, but the popularity of Nolan’s Memento directly inspired Noe when pitching the movie.) The film begins with its credits. The credits are shown in reverse and become part of the experience. From there, we listen to a terrible, nihilistic conversation between two awful men (one of them being the main character from Noe’s previous film I Stand Alone) before they comment on the commotion taking place in the Paris streets below. The police have arrested a man for murder at The Rectum, a gay S&M club. Another man is carted off in a stretcher. The camera whirls dizzily through the streets and into the club, suggesting a change in space and time. We go back and see the events before the murder. When we see the murder, it is brutal. It is revenge for the nine-minute rape sequence we will eventually witness in the middle of the film. But nothing is simple in Irreversible and the killing is terribly ironic.

The violence in Irreversible is gritty and realistic. The grainy, handheld camerawork and the impressive barrage of long takes add to the realism, but also to our confusion and discomfort. To add to queasiness, the film contains an almost inaudible background noise similar to the frequency heard during earthquakes. (Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter provided the soundtrack.) It is all intentionally chaotic, made worse by the fact that all of the film’s extreme content is crammed into its first 55 minutes. The complete lack of build up to these scenes only adds to the nausea, but also the mystery. Who are the two men? Why are they so angry? What brought these men, who clearly do not belong to this community, into a gay sadomasochist club? The film has the feel of a trip through hell, starting in the seventh stage. But in the process, it also critically deconstructs the internal morality of the revenge tale. If you do manage to make it to the end of the movie, I recommend re-watching the beginning scenes again. There a lot of details that are easy to miss out on when you watch it for the first time, without the context.

I do not make arguments to defend extreme content. Again, this film is not for everybody. It is up to the individual to determine for themselves how they feel about it. But I will say that that the extreme content in Irreversible seems even more extreme than it is because of its early placement in the film. I went in already knowing about the rape scene- and I think everyone who wants to see this film should know in advance that it is there. The scene itself is said to be a remarkable exercise in improvisation, as is much of the film. Noe filmed the movie using a treatment that was only three pages long. Personally, took more issue with the content that knew when watching could be interpreted by some as being homophobic. After all, the rapist is bi-sexual pimp seemingly interested only in anal sex. But if I agreed with this assessment, I would not had included Irreversible in the Midnight Selections. I think Noe wanted the to keep Irreversible hyperreal, while simultaneously taking audiences into a believable and visually interesting part of Paris’s underbelly. Noe, aware in advance that his film would stir up this controversy, even inserted a scene of himself as a masturbating patron at the gay club to show that “he does not feel superior to gays.” (Noe has also said in an interview after the film, some people had asked if he was gay and believes that “the gay audience liked the film more than the straight male audience.”) Whether you feel that these points are enough to address the controversy is up to you.

But where Irreversible really starts to put meaning to its violence is in its second half, when the madness subsides, and we get to play witness to the series of events that lead to up to the rape, and later a horrific death. What we see in the last portion of the film is a trail of poor decisions made by three friends, Alex, Marcus and Pierre, caught in kind of an open love triangle. They are not saints. Each of them has vices. But none of them deserve the fate the befalls on them, least of all Alex, the victim of the rape. Monica Bellucci (Alex) and Vincent Cassel (Marcus) were married in real life and there is an intimacy to their scenes together. Noe has fun placing prolific hints of something foreboding into these later scenes, but they are signs the characters fail read. Had we watched the film in order, there would had been ironic statements in the dialogue that we would miss… but we know what will happen, so we watch like hawks, and judge these characters with our unfortunate prior knowledge.

In the end, Irreversible works both as an innovative dissection of the revenge thriller and as a film that cleverly demonstrates the ripples caused by each of our actions. For all its faults, there is reason so many who make it to that final fade out end up championing this film. Like Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, I feel Irreversible represents a re-imagining of what mature adult horror could be. It starts off bold and unrelenting, but ends oddly sad and beautiful. It is ugly, but it is art.