Netflix Love Opening Scene Video

A TikTok Meme Made Gaspar Noe's Controversial 'Love' One of the Top Movies on Netflix

That opening scene is, uh, quite a shocker.

Alchemy

Nothing has taken the Internet by storm quite like the "reaction video" trend, wherein creators will film themselves watching or listening to something -- an insane video, a movie trailer, a previously unheard song, etc. -- for the first time and then post their shrieks of delight and/or disgust for everyone to see. These started in earnest with 2007's gross-out fetish video, "2 Girls 1 Cup," that every teenager dared each other to sit through, and now, it's so common that all over YouTube, professional hairdressers are reacting to people giving themselves bad quarantine haircuts, and young folks are reacting to hearing classic songs for the first time. Recently, the trend has made its way to TikTok, where users are being goaded into watching the opening scene of a certain explicit French movie and filming themselves while they do it.

What started all of this off is the movie 365 Days, a Polish erotic drama about a mafia boss who takes a woman prisoner, giving her 365 days to fall in love with him. It's pretty messed up, and also pretty sexy, with a bunch of lengthy, explicit sex scenes and terrible dialogue that make it clear that what you're watching isn't really about the plot. Because a movie like this is sure to arouse at least some interest (and because we're all super bored and lonely in quarantine), lots of people watched it when it hit US Netflix earlier in June, prompting one TikTok user to make an audio introducing fans of the movie to a similarly sex-filled film from French director Gaspar Noe.

"If you've seen 365 Days and you liked it," the audio begins, "go watch Love on Netflix, and use this sound to record yourself watching the very beginning, like, I mean the very beginning. Hit play and record yourself and let's see your reaction."

Love, which came out in 2015, is about a young film school student living in Paris who has a threesome with his girlfriend and another woman, cheats with this other woman until she becomes pregnant, and is then forced to break up with his girlfriend and move in with the woman and take care of their eventual child. It is, how you say, very French, but it's also notable for Noe's use of unsimulated sex scenes throughout, including the one that starts the whole movie. If you're not prepared, it's quite shocking, as evidenced by all of the TikTokers' open mouths and clutched faces. Just wait until they find out about Nymphomaniac.

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Emma Stefansky is a staff entertainment writer at Thrillist. Follow her on Twitter @stefabsky.