Gaspar Noé's I Stand Alone is a brutal film, on par with or even exceeding Requiem for a Dream in its utter hopelessness and unrelentingly bleak outlook on life. This film is extremely unsettling; it instantly gets under your skin and stays with you long after the film ends. The story is closer to that of Taxi Driver, as a delusional butcher slowly goes insane and his fantasies turn violent. His twisted sense of love, justice, and morality is such an extreme perversion that you really have no idea what he is capable of. But like A Clockwork Orange, this film forces you to empathize with him by using ubiquitous voice-over narration of his innermost private thoughts. Despite wanting to look away in horror and revulsion, your eyes are glued to the screen. The shot compositions tend to avoid showing faces or eyes, focusing instead on the bodies or the mouth, emphasizing the butcher's distorted perceptions. The editing is punctuated by a singular music note or by a gunshot; it is always unexpected and always makes you jump. I found the most terrifying part to simply be the following words: "Warning: You have 30 seconds to leave the screening of this film." After seeing the graphic violence and sex that had come before without any such warning, I was almost trembling with fear as my mind raced through all the possibilities of what could happen. And the climax was absolutely torrential. Perhaps the most twisted part of this movie is that it pretends to give you a happy ending--but that is only the butcher's point of view.This movie represents excellent, effective filmmaking, but is not without flaws. I thought the film lost a lot of steam during the middle thirty minutes, although it brought it back in full force and then some after that lull. Some of the sex scenes early on were unnecessary. (We get that he's watching a porno--we don't also need to be watching it, do we?) I think that an unbelievable amount of political and social commentary went over my head simply because of the intensity of the performances and the vulgarity of the events--there was just too much to focus on all at once. Also, being told entirely from one deranged person's mind, such commentary is inherently biased and as such loses some value. Even with these mistakes, I see a master filmmaker honing his craft, unafraid to immerse himself in realms few have dared even peer into.
IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0157016/