There’s actually only one high-quality movie I’ve seen that I am confident I would never watch again.

“Irréversible.”

The 2002 French film by Gaspar Noe is unique enough, and well-enough made, that it is shown in film classes around the world today.

But it’s so nauseatingly violent and cruel, more than 2,400 people walked out of the screening when it debuted at Cannes.

I’m not a particularly squeamish person. I like horror movies. I like violent action movies. I even like grindhouse movies for their nostalgia.

I like creepy art movies like Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, which I saw for the first time in cinema class at the University of Virginia.

But Irreversible is different.

The narrative device that gives the film its name is that Noe tells the story in reverse, with the first scenes representing the climax of the story. Two men are seeking revenge for an assault on a woman; they find the person they believe committed the crime and savagely beat him to death with a fire extinguisher.

Through the terrible magic of CGI, you slowly — unbearably slowly — see this man’s head bashed into a bloody pulp.

But it’s not just that. Noe has added elements specifically designed to make you sick:

• an almost inaudible background noise that was chosen because of its ability to cause nausea in those who hear it; and
• handheld camera movements intended to induce vertigo (even operating the camera drove Noe to medicate himself with cocaine during the filming).

Little by little, the layers of the story are peeled away and you learn that the man killed was actually innocent of the crime he was accused of.

And the crime he was accused of? The rape and brutal beating of the girlfriend of one of the killers.

Which we see in one of the most realistic, violent and vomit-inducing 10 minutes ever filmed.

The girlfriend, Alex, is walking home alone from a nightclub when she sees a pimp beating a prostitute in a pedestrian underpass.

When she expresses just a moment of sympathy for the woman, the pimp, Le Tenia, lets the prostitute run away and turns his attention to Alex.

He pulls a knife on her and the next nine minutes are torture for Alex, and for the audience. It ends with her face smashed into the cement floor repeatedly by her gleeful assailant. As she is later led away in an ambulance, her face is an unrecognizable mess and it is unclear if she even survives the attack.

We later learn — in the happier times to be revealed at the end/beginning of the film — that Alex was pregnant at the time of the assault.

The last scene shows Alex in a sundress outside on lush green grass, watching children play.

I wouldn’t watch it again if you paid me to do it. But Noe made a film that I simply can’t expunge from my memory.

It’s irreversible in that sense as well.