Irreversible (2002)

Twenty years on, the ledger for Irreversible remains remarkably blank. Here is a film of genuine formal ambition, told in reverse across fourteen apparent long takes, and it earns its place in the cinema of the body through craft alone. What it does not carry is any progressive program. The cast is white French from the top of the call sheet to the bottom, and the few non-white faces on screen appear as anonymous street hustlers offering to help the avengers. A transgender prostitute is beaten in an underpass. None of this is inclusion. It is scenery for a descent.

The same holds elsewhere. The gay BDSM club called Rectum, the predatory assailant, queerness deployed as shorthand for depravity: David Edelstein called it the most homophobic movie ever made. Noe's defense was that he appears in the film himself, masturbating. That is a defense of a particular sort. Alex gets a single line about not being an object, and then the camera holds on her rape for nine unbroken minutes from a fixed position. The sequence is defended as realism. It plays as endurance. No feminist reading survives that edit.

Nothing about the environment. Nothing about class or capital, because the nihilism here is visceral and existential, not economic. The body is a thing to be dismantled with a fire extinguisher, not celebrated. No neurodivergence, no historical revisionism, no sermonizing of any kind. Noe confronts where a lesser director would lecture, which is its own relief in a marketplace saturated with moral instruction. A difficult vintage, presented with a straight face and no apologies. Almost nothing in the glass.