It would be easy and tempting to dismiss the latest efforts from notorious French director Gaspar Noe as part of the ongoing, and generally unwelcome, trend within European cinema to shock and horrify at all costs.

Certainly, if you’re the kind of person who has ever felt remotely squeamish in a cinema, then you probably shouldn’t read on, let alone see the movie concerned. If watching a man’s face and cranium getting bashed in with a fire extinguisher in the opening minutes doesn’t get you, the harrowing and protracted nine-minute anal rape scene with Monica Bellucci almost certainly will.

On their own, these sequences would make for a deeply upsetting experience, but the fact that the film runs chronologically backwards only serves to intensify the overall mind-fuck, as the director reverses us through various horrors toward the sedate pre-rape paradise now lost.

Irreversible, though, is not merely confrontational in subject matter and chronology, it’s also aesthetically difficult. Camera shots crawl up walls and buildings with no particular place to go; the sound is distorted and the lighting is so frequently muddied that vast stretches of the film are virtually unintelligible.

Despite the fact that it is so at odds with accepted film grammar, this undeniably bold cinematic venture manages to be both visually enthralling and fantastically powerful, with Cassel displaying enough demonic, vengeful fury when his onscreen lover (and real life missus) Bellucci is raped, to ensure that no-one so much as looks sideways at her again.

A film which is audacious enough to warrant its frequent references to Kubrick, Irreversible is not so much a night out at the flicks then, as a trawl though Dante’s inner circle of hell. Horrendous, yet impressive.