As James Hoberman said:

“The premise for Rape comes from an Ono film score, published in 1968: The cameraman will chase a girl on a street with a camera persistently until he corners her in an alley, and, if possible, until she is in a falling position.

The execution […] is one of the most violent and sexually charged movies ever made – even if flesh never touches flesh. […] In one sense, Rape is a particularly brutal dramatization of the Warholian discovery that the camera‘s implacable stare disrupts ‹ordinary› behavior to enforce its own regime. In another, the film is a graphic metaphor for the ruthless surveillance that can theoretically attach itself to any citizen of the modern world.”

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And according to Swapnil Dhruv Bose for Far Out Magazine:

“Lennon and Yoko Ono made a 77-minute-long conceptual film in 1969 called Rape. Shot mainly in close-up with a hand-held camera, the film features the single action of a small film-making crew coming upon a woman in a London park and following her through the park, along streets and into her apartment. We are the voyeur and the violator in this symbolic form of video assault. The woman speaks a foreign language and cannot communicate with the crew in English, signifying the helplessness and isolation of the victim.

According to Ono, Rape was a candid recording by cinematographer Nic Knowlton of a woman who was not a voluntary participant of this project. The film was seen as a commentary on Ono’s experience with the press due to her high-profile relationship with Lennon, criticising the lack of privacy that celebrity fetishisation leads to. In later years, it has become a textbook example of the phenomenon of “the male gaze” and how the institution of cinema has mistreated women.

The ideas in the film are theoretically interesting and some of its execution is fascinating, Rape ultimately becomes an endurance test for the viewer because of the 77-minute runtime. However, this is exactly the purpose of such cinematic theses. Lennon and Ono manage to create an atmosphere of discomfort and distress where the audience feels like they are complicit in the terrible crime.”

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HOBERMAN, James. John Lennon/Yoko Ono. Film No 6. Rape (Clip). In: LEVIN, Thomas Y.; FROHNE, Ursula; WEIBEL, Peter (Eds.). CTRL [Space]. Rhetoric of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. Karlsruhe: ZKM, Center for Art and Media, 2002. p. 406f.