I only saw this film once before, many years ago during my graphic violence stage, and I forgot a very, very important thing about it: just how disturbing and stressful it is.

The beauty of this film is not only in the cleverness of the way it is shot or in the plot; the beauty of it is that, compared to other horror films, this is not the worse thing you can watch inside the genre, but it's definitely the worst thing you'll ever see because it's realistic. You can see this happening in the real world, and something like this has probably happened more times than we care to imagine. This is not about some sort of supernatural or far-fetched element, this is about people. People doing disgusting, unforgivable, awful things to other people. Which is why this is a film you can't easily shake off. You will sit there for quite a while after it's done, trust me. That is, if you make it through the whole thing.

At once, this film stresses you out. The first sequences, [spoiler] of Marcus walking around a disgusting gay S&M club [/spoiler], will give you an instant headache. The shakiness of the camera is Gaspar Noé's way of placing you, very much against your will, in the shoes of the characters and what they're going through; the anger, the blinding rage, the stress, the impatience, the extremely bad feeling in your gut. You feel it all, and you have no choice. When the camera is still, you're forced to watch one of the most terrible, violent things being done to another human being, and if you're a woman, the experience of watching it is much worse. And when the scenes are not violent and because the plot is presented in a non-linear way, you mourn over the life that the characters had before everything happened, you mourn because they will never be the same.

This film offers no truce; you will feel awful--whether it's because you're angry, shocked, disgusted or sad--the whole time. And if you don't, my friend, you should really consider self-exploration and therapy, because there must be something wrong with you.

This film features one of the most vivid rape scenes you'll ever see. [spoiler] You see her going into that underpass and you just want to pull her back, you see her not running away when she encounters Le Tenia hitting a transsexual hooker and you want to yell at her and push her to run, then finally you accept her fate and you want to scream just as she's screaming, because it shouldn't have happened to her, and it shouldn't happen to anyone ever. [/spoiler]

The polemic scene is cruel in every possible way, and the whole film is cruel in every possible way. Everything escalates incredibly fast and [spoiler] nothing good comes in the end. Marcus is badly hurt and will probably remain broken by -somewhat unearned- guilt and regret (what happened to Alex isn't his fault, but he could've been there to help her avoid it; that would fuck anyone up), Pierre will probably spend the rest of his life in prison and it's not even worth it because he killed the wrong guy, Alex is in a coma and if she makes it out she will never be the same, she will be more broken than any of them, and Le Tenia is left unscathed. [/spoiler] If that's not cruel...

The bottom line is that this film definitely demands strenght to get through it. And yet, it is so well done that the effort is worth it, even if you're not happy that you saw it.