As a medium that unfolds at 24 frames per second, film has always had an intimate relationship with time – from proto-cinematic experiments like Muybridge’s trip-activated cameras recording the movement of horses to the time-lapse decompositions of Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts. But most movies are content merely to harness this relationship to the cause of narrative’s forward momentum, disguising their jumps and elisions with editing and suturing their fragments together with sound and music.

Gaspar Noé’s approach in Irreversible is somewhat different. “Time Devours All Things” the film tells us, after Ovid, but this is not some Proustian effort at recapturing the past through the power of art, rather a clinical demonstration of the workings of cause and effect over one brief day. So, while Noé is as concerned here with the unfolding of narrative as any Hollywood director, he chooses – ironically, given the film’s title – to tell his story backwards; and what would have otherwise been an average tale of rape, violence and revenge becomes a meditation on the inescapable march of time, the unseen consequences of every action and the fleeting, fragile nature of each moment of experience. So far, so art house, you may be thinking. But, be warned: Noé’s carefully constructed backwards chronology, and the story’s two halves, hinge on a nine-minute rape scene – the terrifyingly still centre to this swirling creation – that saw cinema audiences walking out in horror and disgust. And that was only if they had made it this far.

The film begins with an equally long (each sequence functions – as in Hitchcock’s Rope – as a bravura continuous take) descent into a powerful vision of hell. We don’t know quite what we’re watching, as two men penetrate deeper and deeper into a red-lit, warren-like gay club called The Rectum in search of a man called ‘the tapeworm’. An insanely unhinged camera whirls and flies through the club while the soundtrack whines and pulsates, creating a dizzying, nightmarish sense of dislocation. The scene’s climax is not for the fainthearted; robbed of the catharsis promised by most revenge movies, its ferocity simply appals.

It’s only as we go back in time that each preceding scene takes on meaning, while each glimpse that the film’s ‘present’ affords us into the story’s ‘past’ is accompanied by an ever-growing sense of tragedy, especially as Noé’s manic camera gradually subsides into relative calm, the violent events of the film’s first half replaced by scenes of the everyday.

Irreversible’s central female character (who, we of course know, will soon have her life ripped apart) is glimpsed early on reading a book that will be familiar to many forteans: JW Dunne’s An Experiment With Time. She describes a strange dream that she has had – one which, like those discussed by Dunne, we, with our own special knowledge of what the future holds, know to be precognitive. And this is where, for anyone who has stayed the course, Noé’s seemingly pessimistic, even nihilistic, vision is redeemed. Strangely, as we spool backwards to the film’s end and beginning, we are invited to imagine a world outside the tyranny of time (as did Dunne), where past, present and future co-exist, even if beyond the grasp of our normal human consciousness (the director’s fascination with Kubrick’s 2001 also becomes apparent here). It’s tempting, by the film’s end, to replace “Time Devours All Things” with another motto, the title of one of Dunne’s other books: Nothing Dies.

Irreversible is a remarkable achievement – technically, stylistically and morally – moving far beyond the fashionably miserable and gratuitously shocking, and taking the viewer with it.