They had a quarrel. She leaves the party in a huff. There’re no cabs in sight so she decides to walk home instead. A simple action motivated by an impulse changed her life, more accurately it ended it. Irreversible by Gaspar Noe narrates a gripping tale of how Alex (Bellucci) after a fight with her coked-up boyfriend Marcus (Cassel) , leaves a party to go home. She never gets there; instead she's raped in a desolate tunnel. Her angry boyfriend and buddy Pierre decide to take justice into their own hands and hunt the rapist down themselves.

Many scenes in this film are abrasive and disturbing, the film consists of a gay bashing, followed by a rape and then a murder. The scene opens with Marcus (Vincent Cassel) being taken away in a stretcher from Rectum, an underground gay S&M club. A swirling transition takes us back in time to the inside of the club, where Marcus gets his arm broken after frantically searching for Le Tenia (Jo Prestia). What La Tenia has done and whom he has done it to are the film's central mysteries. The answers unfold within each extended take.

Flashbacks take on a lethal quality in Irreversible as it creates an ironic contrast. Unlike the technique, much of the events that happened within the film such as the rape and her death are irreversible. Yet within the film, we witness the rape and then we are propelled to witness other snippets of her life, the bliss she shares with her boyfriend and later in dreamlike almost surreal sequence, the scene morphed into a pastoral display of angelic harmony symbolized by kids running around. In this film, we see the effect first, then the cause, finally we witness the one fateful, irreversible decision that sets the whole tragic chain of events in motion.

Violation, Shame and Angst filter throughout the film. The title Irreversible sets some thoughts in one’s head, the film acknowledges how some events in our life are irreversible, the scars permanent, a single gesture triggering consequences, possibly fatal. The controversy of this film is wielded by the question “ Is it necessary to have this 9 min scene? What purposes if any does it serve?”

Sitting through the rape scene is particularly disturbing. The camera is merciless, entirely unforgiving; the stillness cripples and paralyses the audience. As we sit through this agonizingly long scene, we witness how a woman’s dignity is being brutally usurped. Yet like the guy who came down to the tunnel and saw the rape scene taking place but didn’t do anything. The audience is put in a position, so distant yet confrontational as we watch helplessly as she gets raped. The stillness of the camera buffers our adamancies, criticizing our inept and chiding our indifference.

Although, this film is smirked with controversy, what lies fundamentally to be explored and recognize is that Irreversible serves as a disturbing reminder to life urging us that there is no real indemnity, and perhaps only impermanence and unpredictability are the true constants reigning triumphant against time.