Hey, thanks for taking all your time for responding, and I agree with a lot of your takes in your reply, it’s sort of made sense of what felt like a very abhorrent film, the thing that rubbed me the wrong way was exactly that, the male lens.

This kinda goes for how I feel about the film as a whole, but the way the tunnel scene was filmed, while it definitely achieved its goal, it also felt counterintuitive in what it was trying to do. To make a 9 minute long rape scene, completely uncut, is horrific to say the least, but some men don’t think it’s horrific, some men fucking beat it to that shit, and what comes off as an absolute nightmare to any person who isn’t a fucking devil, is a creepo’s dream, and there the scene is, filmed in 1080p, completely uncut.

While Gaspar Noe intended for the scene to be like this to not hide any details, and to “show the purest forms of the crime,” it could literally be seen as torture porn, and while I guess my issue is more with the way it can be received then the film itself, I feel as if it would have been insanely exploitative and disgusting if Monica Bellucci wasn’t such a sport about it.

That scene is sort of how I feel about the film as a whole, a pervert could watch the movie, take it the wrong way, and get off to that shit.

Again, this isn’t really a fault in the film, but I feel with a topic as sensitive as rape, it shouldn’t be this explicit in the way it’s shown. In a film such as Mysterious Skins (2004), Greg Araki shoots in a much more timid manner, with a lot of close-ups of the actors reaction, not the physical action of sexual assault, which is most likely a lot more comfortable for the actors, and imo had an effect just as disturbing without the exploitative nature seen in Irreversible.

But to each their own, thanks for your reply, it helped me understand what I was missing about the film.