Gaspar Noe's "I Stand Alone" was brilliant, but this film is stupid, disgusting, and pretentious. The story plays out in achronological order, like in "Memento", from graphic murder, through the unrelenting rape and beating that instigated it, to earlier happy times in an attempt to provide an explanation about predestination, but the result isn't real motivation, it's simply a pat attempt to justify the atrocities. The camera movement at the beginning is so disorienting that it's difficult to follow the action, though it grinds to a halt to vividly show both rape and murder. This is a film that revels in it's excess, but is too cowardly to admit that it's exploitation.
Review of Irreversible
